to lowland habitats. At La Yeguada slashing and burning of the seasonally dry forests peaked around 5000 b.c. Piperno’s phytolith analysis of cores from Lake Gatún, whose pollen distributions were studied in the 1960s by Alexandra Bartlett and Elso Barghoorn, suggested that farming populations in the central Caribbean opened forest clearings between 3000 and 2000 b.c. Her hypothesis is supported by John Griggs’s 1990–1999 surveys in the very humid Coclé del Norte and Belén basins. Griggs identified second-millennium-b.c. activities with Monagrillo-style pottery in stratified rock shelters and open sites. He also demonstrated that later ceramic-using populations were most closely related to populations located on the opposite side of the mountain chain, thus adding credence to the importance of transcordilleran social contact for maintaining material cultural homogeneity. Sediment cores taken in the 1990s from the Cana swamp in eastern Darién indicated that pre-Columbian farmers were practicing slash-and-burn agriculture in this now-forested area by 2000 b.c. Both there and at La Yeguada, forests reoccupied disturbed landscapes at about the time the Spanish invaded Panama. In 1997 Laurel Breece found archaeological evidence for native populations living around the early colonial town of Natá in Coclé Province.

In sum, archaeology currently suggests that strong local and regional integrative processes characterized intercommunity relations in pre-Columbian Panama for millennia. They included continual exchange, fluctuating alliances, and small-scale migrations in response to ecological and/or political pressures. External contacts and perhaps some population movement are evident in new technologies imported from outside the isthmus, such as metallurgy and, probably, pottery, as well as the presence of certain plant cultigens (e.g., maize and yuca). In the 1960s and 1970s geographer Carl Sauer and anthropologist Mary Helms popularized the hypotheses that fine arts and crafts (especially those using cast gold) were imported from Colombia and that Panamanian elites made long-distance journeys in order to obtain scarce objects and esoteric knowledge. Archaeology suggests, however, that the closest contacts were among neighbors. People in Panamanian political territories located near coasts and productive colluvial soils were apparently quite self-sufficient in terms of daily commodities but less so in terms of sumptuary or symbolic ones. Ongoing excavations at Cerro Juan Díaz have demonstrated that some valuable items, such as shells for personal ornaments, were imported—but from no more than 100 kilometers away.

Archaeology also lends support to human population genetics and historical linguistics in suggesting that the precontact populations of Panama descended, for the most part, from late-glacial and early-Holocene colonists, rather than from waves of more recent immigrants from continental areas. In later prehistory (after about a.d. 700) three broad cultural units can be identified on the basis of pottery distributions: Gran Chiriquí, Gran Coclé, and Gran Darién. Their internal and external boundaries were tenuous, however, and waxed and waned over time and space in response to shifting economic emphases and, probably, the consequences of population fission and fusion. None can be related with confidence to modern ethnic groups or languages. But it is very likely that polities encountered by the Spanish when they arrived on the isthmus represented, in part or in whole, antecedent segments of the much-reduced population that survived conquest and assimilation and currently lives on or very near the isthmus of Panama.

Richard Cooke

References

Bird, R. McK. 1980. “Maize Evolution from 500 B.C. to the Present.” Biotropica 12: 30–41.

———. 1984. “South American Maize in Central America?” In Pre-Columbian Plant Migration, 39–65. Ed. D. Z. Stone. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology 76. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Cooke, R. G. 1984. “Archaeological Research in Central and Eastern Panama: A Review of Some Problems.” In The Archaeology of Lower Central America, 263–302. Ed. F. W. Lange and D. Z. Stone. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, School for American Research.