Asking New Questions to Central Nicaraguan Pottery

Summary

Pre-Hispanic Central Nicaraguan pottery has often been addressed as "poorly studied", or "problematic". Therefore, researchers still have a lot of questions regarding the region’s development and specially its interactions with other areas. Even though a ceramic sequence was established at the end of the 1980’s (Gorin 1990, Espinoza and Rigat 1994), analyses have traditionally focused on type-variety and modal traits, often concentrating on decoration techniques and motifs. As a result, we lack vital technological information that will help us determine the different steps of ancient pottery production. This corpus of data are key to enlighten those cultural characteristics we are trying to determine. Consequently, the Leiden University project "Late Prehistoric settlement of Aguas Buenas, Nicaragua, AD 500-1522", directed by Dr. Alexander Geurds, is surveying several pre-Hispanic sites in Chontales to design a series of excavations aimed to obtain ceramic samples that will be analysed using the premises defined by the Chaine Operatoire (Grace 1997). In this paper, we will present a general Phd research plan, the methodological strategies we intend to pursue, as well as the upcoming challenges.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Caminos perdidos y vías olvidadas: Trade Routes and Exchange Networks in Late Pre-Hispanic Central America   •
• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

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