Digging Armadillos: Exploring Burier Effigies of Costa Rica and Panama

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Bribri of eastern Costa Rica believe shamans, pregnant women, and buriers hold the power to open the portal between the earthly realm and the land of the spirits. The last of these, buriers or "morticians" in contemporary lingo, are often associated with scavenging animals such as the armadillo, known as a digger. Ancient art, most often in clay, from southwestern Nicaragua through northwestern Costa Rica down to southern Costa Rica and into Panama attest that humans, seemingly male and often appearing as a hybrid armadillo-human, have held such a role for millennia. That these effigies were most often crafted from rich volcanic clay dug out from the ground, home to the spirits of the deceased and the First Mother/Grandmother, suggests their makers intended for the medium to be a key component of the message: with the help of a digging specialist one's spirit may return to the earth upon death. The round vessel forms of most of these ceramics further push the message of the cycle of life. The variety of such images suggests shared understanding of this key character across the centuries in this Isthmian expanse.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 54090