The vast and secret museum of Chiriqui: Stripping the sharpness and beauty from obsidian

Summary

Prominent, recent explorations of the role of sensory data in archaeology detail the linkages of bodily senses, material objects, and remembering or forgetting to invoke the ‘vast and secret museum of historical and sensory absence’ in analyses. In this paper, I examine the residues and associations of chthonic power and senses that can cling in social memory to volcanic materials. This serves as a query for why an entirely useful material was not in use in the Chiriqui culture area that spans present-day western Panama and eastern Costa Rica; obsidian is rare to nonexistent in Chiriqui artifact assemblages. The closest obsidian sources were likely Honduras and Guatemala to the north or southern Colombia and eastern Ecuador to the south. Given the vast distances that other artifact classes traveled in the pre-Columbian past, this should have provided little impediment. Standard archaeological considerations of utility or access, I argue, are insufficient explanations for this absence. In the area of the Barú volcano, in particular, perhaps the role of ‘obsidian’ (i.e., ‘useful stone powerfully linked to the volcano’) was played by dacite slabs, basalt columns, and even tephra that circulated widely in the Chiriqui past.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Exotic, Lustrous, and Colorful: Obsidian in Symbol, Society, and Ceremony

Keywords

Spatial Coverage