Mission under the auspices of CEMCA (Centre d’ Études Mexicaines et Centramericaines), headquartered in Mexico City. Beginning in 1984, Dominique Rigat and Franck Gorin worked first in the Chontales area east of Lake Nicaragua, and later in the Lake Managua basin in the north central part of the country. These projects contributed to the goal of a national inventory of archaeological sites that is being supported by the Organization of American States, and in Chontales they recovered stone statuary from a dateable context. The research also contributed significantly to our understanding of differences in regional settlement patterns, and in the distribution of imported obsidian, locally available lithic materials, southern Mesoamerican ceramics, and Greater Nicoya ceramics.

Navarro (1993) and Espinosa (1993) have provided brief reviews of some of the projects from the 1980s and the early 1990s.

Recent Developments, 1990s.

The first years of the 1990s make it clear that the greatest era of research in Nicaraguan archaeology lies in the future. A Swedish archaeological project, under the direction of Lars Radin, embarked on a first-ever detailed mapping project of Zapatera Island. Laraine Fletcher from Adelphi University (New York) is meeting both national site inventory and settlement pattern and chronological sequence development in unknown areas with a project in the Esteli-Somoto area in north central Nicaragua. Nicaraguan archaeologists (Ronaldo Salgado, Jorge Zambrana, Edgard Espinosa, and Rafael Gonzalez) are participating actively in both of the projects, and gradually assuming increased analytical and reporting responsibilities.

Silvia Salgado, a Costa Rican graduate student at SUNY-Albany, obtained dissertation funding from the National Science Foundation to initiate a project at the Ayala site, near Granada. While she was also able to refine the early part of the regional sequence, her main emphasis was on site hierarchies and internal site organization. She also recovered southern Honduran ceramics that further blurred the poorly defined boundaries between the northern edge of “Greater Nicoya” and the southern “frontier” of Mesoamerica.

Nicaraguan archaeologists, as well as some of the foreign archaeologists working in Nicaragua, participated in a National Science Foundation–sponsored conference on the future of research in Greater Nicoya in Costa Rica in May of 1993. The Organization of American States funded the first training course for archaeologists in Nicaragua, from February to June of 1993. The course was extremely successful and benefited from participation by university professors and students and employees of other government institutions in addition to the national museum. Arellano (1993) has edited a volume recapitulating the last thirty years of archaeological research in Nicaragua.

None of the universities in Nicaragua currently offers a degree in archaeology and there are no university-employed archaeologists. The National Museum of Nicaragua employs four archaeologists, all of whom have been trained “on the job” working with foreign archaeological projects; none of the four has a degree in anthropology/archaeology. Of similar concern is the lack of a national archaeological journal (such as Vinculos, published by the National Museum of Costa Rica) to provide a local outlet in Spanish of Nicaraguan research, and to educate the government and the public about the importance of protecting and studying the nation’s cultural heritage. Despite this somewhat gloomy reality some progress is being made by dedicated archaeologists, working under difficult circumstances.

Costa Rica

Costa Rican archaeology has experienced greater development than has archaeology in Nicaragua. The shift from reliance on foreign archaeologists to a primary dependence on country nationals has largely been completed in Costa Rica. Various authors (see Arias 1982; Corrales 1987; Fonseca 1992) have examined the development of archaeology in Costa Rica, and in this section their approaches are merged with the Willey and Sabloff framework. For example, Arias (1982, 4; translation mine) observed that: