Archaeologists and Huaqueros
By Michael J. Snarksis
The Treasure-hunters, amateur excavators and tomb-robbers (known from Costa Rica to Peru as huaqueros) are invariably earlier in the field than the archaeologists; and this rule -- to which there are regrettably few exceptions -- is particularly well illustrated in Central America.
Claude Baudez: Central America. Barrie and Jenkins, London (1970), page25
Claude Baudez, during the 1960s, was one of the first scientific archaeologists to speak out strongly on the devastations of looters in Costa Rica, remarking that the relatively primitive state of the discipline in Central America was due in large part to the utter destruction of countless archaeological sites by tomb-robbers. This unfortunate situation is poorly understood by the general public, which enjoys impressive collections of beautiful and exotic objects, but often does not understand that archaeologists, to interpret correctly the meaning or function of an object, must know the context of its recovery-how, where, and with what it was found. The materials that allow scholars to reconstruct the fascinating details of prehistoric life and the interacting processes that shaped its development are usually modest things like scraps of stone and pottery, bones, charcoal, and food remains, or even things invisible to the naked eye, like pollen grains. Looters destroy or disturb all these things and render their interpretative potential null. If the remains of past cultures are not recovered and analyzed in a controlled, scientific way, the door is left open to naive speculations and self-serving, sensationalized accounts that propagate falsehoods and stimulate further destruction.
Uncontrolled digging in Costa Rica is recorded as early as the beginning of the 19th century; it has continued apace ever since. Toward the end of that century, the first railway in the Atlantic Watershed (built by Minor C. Keith to haul out the bananas grown by the soon-to-be-formed United Fruit Company) was put through the middle of Las Mercedes, an important late architectural site, and crews of looters employed by Keith and others quickly assembled large collections of stone sculpture and other artifacts.
Archaeological investigations in the modern sense may be said to have begun in Costa Rica with the work of Swedish archaeologist Carl V. Hartman in 1896 and 1897. Hartman worked at Las Mercedes, in the Atlantic lowlands, and at several other late sites in the Cartago valley, as well as at the site of Las Huacas in Guanacaste. Although nonstratigraphic, Hartman's excavations were recorded carefully and comprehensively, and he set forth the first evidence for a sequence of archaeological cultures in Costa Rica. Hartman concentrated on burial grounds, and his meticulous recording of funerary constructions and associations remains unsurpassed today. While his methods were empirical and his goals old-fashioned (he ignored midden deposits, and one of his major duties was to obtain pieces for the Royal Natural History Museum in Sweden), Hartman accomplished the first clearing and mapping of habitational and cemetery features in Costa Rica, and his systematic recording of information allows modern archaeologists to ask different questions of the data.
Sadly, Hartman's admirable pioneering example was not followed up in Costa Rica for more than 50 years. Archaeological syntheses as recent as that of Gordon R. Willey continued to rely on the relative and very general two-part stylistic sequence for the Central Highlands-Atlantic Watershed regions (Curridabat-Stone Cist Ware, the latter coeval in part with the Spanish arrival, as shown by the presence of European glass beads in some tombs) established by Hartman at the turn of the century.
The next major publication dealing with Costa Rican archaeology was Pottery of Costa Rica and Nicaragua by Samuel K. Lothrop. This two-volume compendium sought to classify Costa Rican and some Nicaraguan Precolumbian ceramics through a stylistic analysis of pottery in private and museum collections in several countries. Since the material studied came from uncontrolled digging, stratigraphic and associational controls were lacking, and the resulting classification is purely descriptive, with no temporal significance. Lothrop was aware of the limitations imposed by his sample, and did not attempt unwarranted speculations about chronology. His work constituted the first comprehensive description of Costa Rican archaeological materials, including an excellent summary and interpretation of relevant Spanish historical chronicles.
Doris Stone, who served as President of the Board of Directors of the Museo Nacional de Costa Rica (MNCR) from 1949 to 1967, conducted brief excavations, mostly of tomb features, in many parts of the country during that time, but publications were few and informal. Her first summaries of Costa Rican archaeology were primarily descriptive, following Lothrop's and Hartman's terminology in great part. In 1962, Stone published the first full-fledged ethnography of the surviving Talamancan Indian tribes, the Bribri and Cabecar. She also published two archaeological syntheses, one on Central America and one on Costa Rica.
Scientific, goal-oriented archaeology got off the ground in the late 1950s, when Claude Baudez of the Museo de l'Homme and Michael D. Coe of Yale University conducted stratigraphic excavations in Guanacaste-Nicoya. Their careful work produced the first reliable archaeological sequence for that region, complete with radiocarbon dates and chronologically significant ceramic types. An almost identical sequence was published by Albert Norweb for the Rivas Peninsula of Nicaragua. The local periodization set up by these archaeologists is still in use.
Wolfgang Haberland, of the Museum fur Volkerkunde, Hamburg, also worked in Costa Rica during the 1950s, in the Diquis zone. He identified and classified many of the ceramics published earlier by William H. Holmes and George G. MacCurdy for the adjacent Panamanian province of Chiriqui, and sought to establish a relative archaeological sequence for Diquis by comparing its ceramics to the dated material from Guanacaste-Nicoya. At that time, Haberland excavated mostly cemetery sites, and did not publish any radiocarbon dates; most of his articles were short, descriptive site reports.
In 1963, Lothrop published the results of rather extensive test excavations in the Diquis Delta. Although he dug some pits in one-foot levels, he was able to offer only very general observations on the relative ages of the pottery he found. He published no radiocarbon dates, typing his ceramics descriptively and seeking to associate them with dated material from other parts of the country.
During the 1960s, controlled archaeological excavations were carried out by Matthew W. Stirling of the National Geographic Society on the Linea Vieja lowlands, and by William J. Kennedy of Florida Atlantic University and Carlos Aguilar of the Universidad de Costa Rica in the Reventazon River valley near Turrialba. These reports make up the first body of published data derived from stratigraphic digging in the Atlantic Watershed of Costa Rica, a method in use more than 50 years earlier in other parts of the Americas. Focusing primarily on tombs, Stirling dug at five sites between Siquirres and Guapiles, and published a series of C- 14 dates ranging from 1440 to 1470 A.D., establishing for the first time at least 1,400 years of time depth for the Precolumbian cultures in the region. Kennedy sought to correlate archaeological sites of different time periods with a series of nine environmental zones or biotopes, finding that prehistoric man preferred, for the most part, those zones also occupied by the modern population. He published eight C-14 dates ranging from 420 to 1220 A.D., and observed a sequence of ceramic styles similar to that found by Stirling. Aguilar partially excavated the "ceremonial center" of Guayabo de Turrialba. While Stirling, Kennedy, and Aguilar arranged much of the pottery first described by Lothrop in an approximate (but incomplete) chronological sequence for the Atlantic Watershed, lack of communication between them prevented the establishment of standardized ceramic types and archaeological periods.
From 1966 until the present, Frederick W. Lange, now of Illinois State University, has excavated at many sites along the Nicoya coast, often in shell middens. His work has shed light on changing settlement patterns and subsistence activities, especially in relation to small-scale climate change and other natural phenomena, such as volcanic activity. Jeanne Sweeney has reanalyzed the ceramics, lithics, and faunal material excavated by M. Coe some 20 years earlier in Nicoya, and Paul Healy of Trent University has done likewise for Norweb's mostly unpublished material from Rivas.
Since the mid- 1970s, there has been a quantum jump in scientific archaeology in Costa Rica. In 1974-75, the author, later assisted by Lange, established a comprehensive program for archaeological investigation, based in the MNCR, incorporating long-term and salvage projects, the training of Costa Rican students, and the publishing of a professional anthropological journal, Vinculos. Through a series of projects, knowledge of the settlement patterns and subsistence of past cultures has been greatly broadened, the classification of artifacts and other cultural features systematized, and the cultural sequence greatly lengthened. In 1977, Ferrero published a broad, up-to-date synthesis of the archaeology and ethnohistory of the country, the first of its kind in Spanish. Aguilar has continued work at sites in the Central Highlands, and his student, Oscar Fonseca Zamora-who obtained a graduate degree at the University of Pittsburgh, where he published analyses of some of Hartman's material-has reopened and greatly broadened the excavation and restoration project at Guayabo de Turrialba.
Many of Lange's former students on field projects in Guanacaste-Nicoya have begun to publish their work, as has the first generation of criollo, or "home-grown," archaeologists, trained by the MNCR and the Universidad de Costa Rica.
Michael J. Snarskis is one of Costa Rica's foremost archaeologists. A graduate of Yale University, Dr. Snarskis received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and directed the Archaeological Research Program at the National Museum of Costa Rica for 10 years and was a professor of archaeology at the University of Costa Rica for 14 years. He guides tours to Guayabo National Monument and the archaeological museums of San José. For further information contact Dr. Snarskis at snarskis@arqueocostarica.org
|
