Earl Flint and J.F. Bransford conducted some of the first documented excavations in Nicaragua, and their collections are now in the smithsonian institution and in the peabody museum at Harvard University. Flint presented the first scientific report on the famous footprints of Acahualinca, but unfortunately assigned them an excessively speculative age of more than fifty thousand years! Bransford was with a U.S. Navy medical group and took advantage of being in Nicaragua to explore certain aspects of its prehistory. His report described work on Ometepe Island and in the isthmus of Rivas, and illustrated both one of the earliest (Bocana Zoned Incised) and latest (Luna Polychrome) ceramics types known from the area.

Carl Bovallius was a Swedish naturalist who recorded drawings of statues, petroglpyhs, and artifacts, primarily from Zapatera Island. Already in the nineteenth century this island had become a standard stop on the archaeological tour. Karl Sapper also traveled through the area and filed cursory reports on the sites and artifacts he encountered. As a geographer, his environmental and physical descriptions are perhaps of even greater interest.

Classificatory and Historical Period, 1914–1940.

While Herbert Spinden never actually conducted archaeological research in either Nicaragua or Costa Rica, his interest in Central American and Mayan archaeology inspired him to suggest models that influenced other scholars who did work in the two countries.

As Doris Stone (1984, 17) noted: “Spinden… broadened Lehmann’s concept of the archaeological culture center to include three provinces of lower Central America (a) northern Honduras east of La Ceiba and eastern Nicaragua north of Rivas and west of the forest zone; (b) southern Nicaragua; and (c) northern Costa Rica, subdivided into six sections.” While based on linguistic data that were not universally accepted at the time, Spinden’s model was the first careful attempt to divide prehistoric Nicaragua and Costa Rica into cultural/geographical areas.

Chronological Concerns, 1914–1949.

While the historical period ends in 1940 with Willey and Jeremy Sabloff’s scheme, it lasted until into the early 1960s in Nicaragua, where there was a distinct time lag in the development of scientific archaeological research and the establishment of national and regional cultural chronologies. In other parts of Latin America (Mexico, peru, etc.) chronological sequences had been developed since the 1920s.

Samuel K. Lothrop did not excavate during his sojourn in Costa Rica and Nicaragua in the 1920s. Like Bransford, he originally went to the area as an employee of the United States government, and took advantage of the slow pace of official business to pursue his interests in archaeology. He attempted to relate his descriptive corpus of ceramics to known chronologies from southern mesoamerica and Mexico, and, perhaps more importantly, created a two-volume visual museum (Lothrop 1926) of the pre-Columbian ceramic art of Nicaraguan and Costa Rica.

In Nicaragua, a locally defined cultural historical sequence began to emerge only at the very end of the 1950s, when the Institute for Andean Research’s “Program on the Inter-relationship of New World Cultures” permitted Gordon Willey and Albert H. Norweb to survey and test a number of sites on the isthmus of Rivas. Wolfgang Haberland also contributed to the development of the Nicaraguan chronological framework with his work on Ometepe with Peter Schmidt in the early 1960s. This also created the first example of methodological contrast, with Hno. Hildeberto Maria carrying on thematic studies on rock art and petroglyphs at the same time that Haberland and Schmidt were conducting their cultural-historical research.

Willey, Norweb, and Haberland’s work also marked the beginning of the qualitative imbalance between Costa Rican and Nicaraguan research, with the Nicaraguan sequences being primarily dependent on cross-dating with the better chronometrically controlled sequences (see Appendix III; Lange and Stone 1984) from Costa Rica. After thirty years, additional chronometric data from Pacific Nicaragua were obtained by Salgado at the Ayala site in 1992–93 (see below).

Context and Function, 1940–1960.

There was little archaeological activity in Nicaragua during