New Evidence on the Early Occupation of the Lakes Basin of 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.

Evidence for early sedentary villagers is perplexingly difficult to identify in Pacific Nicaragua. Wolfgang Haberland thought he found Early Formative remains, which he named the Dinarte phase, on Ometepe Island, but our own efforts to resample those putative early deposits did not meet with much success. More productive have been our efforts to take a broader, whole-landscape approach. Sediment cores from the edge of Ometepe Island and from the Lake Managua (Xolotlan) shore just east of Managua document farming around both lakes by shortly after 1000 cal BC at the latest. On the slopes above Lake Managua, a paleosol below a thick volcanic sand deposit at La Arenera contains maize and cotton pollen with an inferred date of around 900 cal BC. This paper reviews this and other recent evidence for early village farmers in the lakes basin.

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37794.0