for Panamanian pottery sequences. He noted that painted shards associated with rectangular houses in the area were most similar to Verrill’s finds from Coclé and that round houses contained a different pottery style (now known to be more recent). Precisely identified mollusk remains provided insights about food procurement and trade. But neither Lothrop’s team nor Linné sieved for other faunal or plant materials.

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Top left: Gordon Willey (foreground) and Charles R. McGimsey III (on bank) at the Cerro Girón (AG-2) site, Coclé Province, 1952; top right: Junius Bird sieving materials at Cueva de los Ladrones, Coclé Province, 1974; center: Dolores Piperno and Paulo De Oliveira take sediment samples from the Laguna de San Carlos, Coclé Province, 1997; bottom left: Anthony Ranere and Olga Linares excavating at the preceramic Cerro Mangote site, Coclé Province, 1979; bottom right: Luís Alberto Sánchez and Adrián Badilla (right) excavate a shaft tomb with multiple secondary burials at Cerro Juan Díaz, Los Santos Province, 1992.

(Richard Cooke)

Soon after World War II Matthew Stirling and gordon willey surveyed the coastal plains of Coclé and the Azuero Peninsula and excavated at cemeteries and dwelling sites. Willey and John Ladd applied pottery seriation to stratified middens and identified painted pottery styles antecedent to and later than Sitio Conte’s mortuary sample; a large cemetery at El Hatillo (heavily looted in the 1960s) definitely postdated most Sitio Conte graves. Stirling’s brief helicopter and canoe surveys revealed cave burials and dwelling sites in the Caribbean, at Utivé, in the Coclé highlands, on the Panama Bay islands, and at Barriles in highland Chiriquí, where stone statues of double human figures and massive metates (stone slabs used to grind vegetable material) were evidence for a looted ceremonial center.

In a continental context the most significant postwar research concerned older coastal sites associated with fossil Holocene landforms. In 1954 American archaeologists Gordon Willey and Charles McGimsey identified a simple red-painted and incised pottery style (Monagrillo) among Parita Bay shell middens. McGimsey trenched a preceramic shell deposit (Cerro Mangote) and associated its unifacially flaked and ground stone tools and primary and secondary