economy on both watersheds diverged, although constant exchange favored cross-cordilleran social contacts. Caribbean populations grew little maize, lived in impermanent hamlets, and exploited coastal resources and forest-edge mammals. Pacific populations, by contrast, congregated in larger and more permanent villages, were more stratified socially, and depended more heavily on maize.

In the late 1960s the military government appointed Panamanian anthropologist Reina Torres de Araúz to run the National Heritage Department of the government. In that position she constrained amateur archaeology, built a new anthropology museum, and set up research and conservation programs. Constitutional reforms in 1972 improved legislation for site protection, and Panamanian Gladys de Brizuela and London University graduate Richard Cooke were contracted to direct salvage excavations. Panamanian university teams carried out systematic surveys and test excavations east of the Panama Canal and discovered new pottery types. Their work confirmed the existence of a Gran Darién material culture that diverged from that of Gran Coclé after about a.d. 700 (Cooke 1998). The Gran Darién culture sequence, however, remains very poorly dated. From 1979 to 1981 extensive excavations were conducted by Cooke and Beatriz Rovira in the Old Quarter of the “new” (post–a.d. 1673) Panama City; in the 1990s the Panama Viejo Patronage excavated at “old” Panama City (Panamá la Vieja), where Rovira’s research team has uncovered pre-Columbian remains under the sixteenth-century colonial occupation.

Some research in the 1960s and 1970s continued the regional culture-history tradition established in former decades. From 1967 to 1970 French archaeologist Alain Ichon surveyed the Tonosí Valley on the Azuero Peninsula. He used stratified (but arbitrarily divided) midden and mortuary samples to establish a four-phase ceramic sequence, which highlighted many similarities and some differences between that area and Parita Bay. He also discovered ritual-cum-defensive hilltop sites. Cooke’s 1969–1971 survey and test excavations in western Coclé refined the ceramic sequence proposed by Lothrop, Willey, and Ladd. He argued that the Gran Coclé culture was not the product of diffusion from an epicenter but rather the consequence of continual interaction among culturally related polities dispersed across central Panama (Cooke 1984, 1985). Ichon gave greater explanatory weight to extraisthmian impacts and established that metallurgy had appeared in Panama coevally with the Tonosí polychrome style (a.d. 200–500). Linares (1977b) reanalyzed Sitio Conte art and proposed that Gran Coclé chiefs won power through personal prowess in war and politics, rather than through inherited status. Drolet conducted a systematic survey along the Costa Arriba de Colón and found evidence for specialized stone-tool manufacture at Ronsuao.

Linares’s western Panama project benefited from the expertise of paleobotanists C. Earle Smith and Walton Galinat and zooarchaeologists Donald K. Grayson, Elizabeth Wing, and Richard White. One keystone paper argued that Cerro Brujo’s Caribbean residents hunted in forest gardens (Linares 1976). Another compared Caribbean and Pacific fishing strategies (Wing 1980). At Sitio Sierra (from 1971 to 1975) Cooke recovered copious data on hunting and fishing around Parita Bay from about a.d. 200 to the conquest and initiated a Neotropical vertebrate skeleton collection (Cooke 1992; Cooke and Ranere 1999). Robert Bird’s study of Sitio Sierra maize macroremains complemented Galinat’s evaluation of highland Chiriquí cobs and kernels (Bird 1980, 1984; Galinat 1980). Clearly, by a.d. 1–500, four- to twelve-rowed dent and flour corns were being consumed intensively in Pacific-side settlements in Panama.

In the 1970s and 1980s new models were proposed for the lifeways and interrelations of small-scale societies that lacked fine pottery, statuary, and goldwork. junius b. bird searched for late-glacial (Paleo-Indian) sites around manmade Lake Madden, where amateurs earlier collected a Clovis-like whole fluted point and a fishtail–like broken fluted point. Bird did not find Paleo-Indian materials in situ, although simultaneous surface collections recovered additional fluted points. In 1974 Bird and Cooke failed to locate Paleo-Indian materials at the