The Rise of Social Complexity in Pacific Nicaragua

Summary

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.

Despite over 150 years of research, the archaeology of Nicaragua remains in its infancy. Projects have conducted settlement pattern surveys and rescue projects have recovered information from endangered sites, but very little problem-oriented research has ever been conducted. Consequently, “big question” interpretations such as the rise of social complexity are generally answered vaguely based on ambiguous data, often supplemented with interpretations adopted from surrounding regions. A basic chronology has been proposed with a refined ceramic sequence, satisfying some of the goals of a culture history for Pacific Nicaragua, but more complex questions are rarely addressed. Over the past decade, however, several rescue projects in the Managua area have recovered information on the La Arenera and Las Delicias periods (500 BCE–400 CE), with which some tentative insights on the rise of complexity can be offered. These data are contextualized with settlement pattern data from Granada, Rivas, and Masaya-Tisma.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37948.0