Out of Mexico: An Archaeological Evaluation of the Migration Legends of Greater Nicoya

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ethnohistoric documents pertaining to the Greater Nicoya archaeological subarea document legends in which the inhabitants of western Nicaragua and northwestern Costa Rica traced their ancestry to migrations from the north, presumably in Mexico. Linguistic data indicate that speakers of Chorotega, an Oto-Manguean language, and Nicarao, an Uto-Aztecan language—both apparently intrusive into a region dominated by speakers of Misumalpan and Chibchan speakers—were present in Greater Nicoya in the sixteenth century. Archaeologists and art historians have long noted that polychrome ceramic vessels dating to the centuries prior to the arrival the Spanish also suggested a strong but to date a still poorly defined "Mesoamerican influence” characterized by design layout, specific motifs, and iconographic elements such as feathered serpents that resemble those of specific parts of Mesoamerica. This paper critically examines these migration legends in the context of over two decades of systematic archaeological research. We evaluate the successes and failures of a search for specific ethnic identities representing long-distance, north-to-south migrations in the archaeological record and offer an informed explanation for the existence of these migration legends in the oral history of Greater Nicoya.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33113