Central America and Northern South America (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Celise Chilcote-Fricker.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The characteristics and roles of the preconquest cultures that once existed in Central America have long been the subject of debate, the main focus of which revolves around the nature of their relationships to the surrounding Mesoamerican and Chibchan cultural areas. Largely accepted that no...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hernando Giraldo Tenorio.

The prehispanic societies from the Cauca river Valley, Colombia, have been portrayed as classical examples of the development of political complexity caused by intergroup conflict for basic resources in constrained environments. However, the existence of warfare in the region itself has not been backed by strong archaeological evidence. The re-analysis of the earth structures of the archaeological site of Malagana, in southwestern Colombia, suggest the existence of regional warfare, which...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yajaira Nunez-Cortes. Ashley Sharpe. Nicole Smith-Guzmán. Geissel Vargas.

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Richard Cooke dedicated his career to the study of past human groups on the lower Central American land bridge (southern Nicaragua to northern Colombia) and their diversification in the tropical landscapes of the region. He has argued that the diverse...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hernando Giraldo Tenorio. Marcela Benavides Imbachi.

This is an abstract from the "The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recientes investigaciones arqueológicas sobre las unidades políticas prehispánicas del suroccidente colombiano resaltan que las desigualdades sociales no fueron el resultado del control diferencial en la producción de ciertos bienes ni en la acumulación de riqueza por parte...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Roberto Herrera. Francisco Corrales-Ulloa.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Southern Central American archaeology is a rich tapestry of variation that makes the task of discerning distinctions and commonalities a difficult one, hindered by a lack of systematic research, particularly in southern Costa Rica. This study offers initial findings from recent fieldwork...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lauren Clark. Meradeth Snow. Mark MacKenzie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Identifying the specifics of location and time of the cultivation and domestication of the cochineal beetle (Dactylopius coccus) in the New World has eluded archaeologists and ecologists for decades. The cochineal’s production of red dye from its rich storage of carminic acid has made this insect a notable element in the lives of pre-contact Mesoamerican and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Prufer. Dolores Piperno. Nadia Neff. Mark Robinson. Douglas Kennett.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite a century of research into the lives and diets of the northern neotropics’ earliest populations, our understanding of food production and consumption and its impact on diet quality remains relatively impoverished. We present a first view of data generated from archaeological sites in the Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yajaira Núñez Cortés.

This is an abstract from the "Advances and New Perspectives in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lomas Entierros is a primary center in Central Pacific Costa Rica, characterized by the presence of monumental architecture on top of a defensible hill, and the circulation of important amounts of imported ceramics. The architectural system combined elevated half-moon terraces with cobblestone walls, foundations, slopes with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Callaghan. Alvaro Montenegro. Scott Fitzpatrick.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, prehistoric contacts have been suggested between Ecuador and western Mexico, occurring from 400 BC, if not earlier, to the sixteenth century based on similarities in mortuary behaviors, ceramic technology, language, and ethnohistoric accounts, and other lines of evidence. However, the frequency of these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Carpio.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Known as "The Red Devil" or the "Muñeco", a rock painting in Olmec style, located in the municipality of Amatitlán, department of Guatemala. This was reported at the end of the 70s of the last century and has been visited on numerous occasions by various specialists. In this paper we will present a synthesis of its discovery and the investigations carried out,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Fitzgerald-Bernal.

Se presenta una re-evaluación de la frontera oriental del Gran Chiriquí y su relación con la sub-región de Veraguas del Gran Coclé en Panamá Central. A partir de hallazgos recientes de petrograbados en el sur de Veraguas y una revisión de la literatura, se reconocen las limitantes inherentes a una definición estática de fronteras culturales y se analiza la "chiricanidad" de la cultura material veragüense como ejemplo de las dinámicas históricas en la conformación de entidades regionales. Se...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alvaro Brizuela Casimir. Gloria Biffano Marcial.

We present a review of the data obtained during the "Proyecto de Rescate Arqueológico Estí (PRAE)" that took place between 2000-2003 in the context of the environmental mitigations of the Estí hydroelectric project; and with special attention to the Barrigón site. Barrigón is a cemetery site from prehispanic times localized near to the Gualaca city in Chiriqui province (Panamá). This kind of "necropolis" was placed in the flat top of a little hill a few meters from the Barrigón river. We...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amanda Suárez Calderón.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The settlement of Java is a Precolumbian socioceremonial center located on a hilltop in the Coto Brus Valley, in Southern Costa Rica. An intensive survey of the site revealed that the main occupation of the site occurred several centuries earlier than previously thought. Java is one of the largest settlements from the Aguas Buenas period, with an area of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oscar Neill.

La zona nororiental de Honduras en la época prehispánica, y su interacción con Mesoamérica al oeste, ha sido poco abordada. El patrón de asentamiento regional así como interno de cada sitio es igual poco conocido y muchas veces confundido con el área vecina al este. Los reconocimientos de superficie en esta década nos han brindado resultados preliminares sobre el patrón de asentamiento regional y de sitio de la costa nororiental, concretamente en la Cuenca del Río Cangrejal, el Bajo Aguan en el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Fitzgerald-Bernal.

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A significant, yet not fully recognized contribution of Richard Cooke’s to the understanding of Panamanian archaeology were his erudite analyses of contact time chronicles and documentation. Through systematic contrast and comparison of documents,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Masucci. John Hoopes.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists have long noted similarities in ceramic technologies and traditions between Costa Rica and Ecuador. These are relevant for models of culture change, whether the result of direct interactions or parallel cultural processes in the emergence of social complexity. We test the alternatives of direct,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carly Pope.

This is an abstract from the "Materials in Movement in the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Isla Colon, the largest island in the Bocas del Toro archipelago on Panama’s northwest coast, has a unique density of archaeological features in the region. Sitio Drago, the largest site yet found on the island, includes ceremonial and settlement mounds and a diverse and sizable assemblage of subsistence remains and cultural materials....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rodrigo Solinis-Casparius. Christopher T. Fisher. Anna Cohen. Juan C. Fernandez Diaz. Jason Bush.

The Mosquitia ecosystem of NE Honduras is a critical region for understanding past patterns of socio-political development and interaction between Mesoamerica and Central America. Caches of ground stone and other objects have long been noted for the region but have never before been systematically examined. Here we report on the recent partial excavation and consolidation of one of these deposits from the newly documented city of the Jaguar, Gracias a Dios, Honduras, constituting a deposit of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Berrey.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The early complex societies of Central America and northern South America were once widely recognized for their organizational and cultural diversity. Since that time, greater emphasis has been placed on their shared cultural traits, as revealed through genetic and linguistic data and patterns...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicole Smith-Guzmán. Jeny Smid Núñez. Jonathan Cybulski. Luis Sánchez Herrera.

This is an abstract from the "Unraveling the Mysteries of the Isthmo-Colombian Area’s Past: A Symposium in Honor of Archaeologist Richard Cooke and His Contributions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Burial space reuse and prolonged interaction with the dead were common practices in the Isthmo-Colombian Area, dating back to at least the Early Ceramic period. However, it is unknown whether the individuals interred in disturbed, multiple burial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Frederick Lange.

To paraphrase the symposium organizers, for decades changes in the pre-Columbian material culture of Central America were attributed to either migration or conquest. When I began archaeological research in Costa Rica in 1969 the endless debate was about Mesoamerican influence. Technological and iconographic linkages were frequently cited, but rarely were the mechanisms of the proposed linkages adequately defined or demonstrated archaeologically. In 2008, perhaps unduly influenced by having moved...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yajaira Núñez-Cortés. Francisco Corrales-Ulloa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Central Pacific region is one of the least explored areas of Costa Rican archaeology. Recent research conducted at Lomas Entierros and Sardinal sites allow us to contribute to the understanding of the history of occupation in the area, but also to consider the emergence, occupation and abandonment of prominent political centers inhabited during AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacy Drake.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Studies of ancient Maya mortuary patterns have asserted that Maya burials do not adhere to a singular mortuary pattern (Ashmore and Geller 2005, Fitzsimmons 2009, Geller 2004, Ruz Lhuillier 1965, Welsh 1988). However, many of these same studies also suggest that a review of data specific to certain contexts (inter-site, time period,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Ruf.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Using Costa Rican precolumbian jade, jadeite, and greenstone artifacts from the collections of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, this study aims to amplify and widen the range of research carried out on the Isthmo-Colombian Area. It particularly seeks to examine and discuss the role of those objects as indicators of rank and prestige as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliet Wiersema.

Throughout the late Spanish colonial period, the Dagua River in Colombia’s Cauca Valley was a multi-cultural backwater. Its shores were inhabited by mestizos, mulattos, slaves, and free slaves, with a minority of Indians and Spaniards. While this area was mined for gold and offered one of few routes to the Pacific from Colombia’s interior, the Dagua River region was largely cut off from global trade and colonial currents due to its geographical remoteness. 50 days distant from Cartagena and 14...