Investigating The Origins of Monumentality in Ancient Costa Rica

 

Payson Sheets, Anthropology

 

My interdisciplinary research in Costa Rica has discovered ancient footpaths, by combining archaeology with volcanology, biology, ethnography, and remote sensing. Beginning about 500 BC the sustained use of the same ancient path for centuries resulted in its entrenchment, and I think that may have become an important cultural standard for entering special places. Then, I suspect, that when the chiefs of later complex societies needed monumental entrances to impress their people and visitors, they constructed huge sunken entryways. I wish to explore this possible developmental relationship during August 2006. If we can relate the early sunken paths with the later big sunken roadways, and use Native Costa Rican ethnography for potential explanations, we will develop a multi-year research proposal to explore relationships more deeply, and in more large chiefdom sites.

Since the 1980s I have been conducting research in the Arenal area of Costa Rica. We found that from 2000 to 500 BC people buried their dead within villages near their houses. That changed dramatically around 500 BC when people established cemeteries a few kilometers from their villages, and that separation continued until the Spanish Conquest in the 1500s. Costa Rican archaeologists have long known of the separation of villages and cemeteries, but they have never been able to relate a cemetery to a village. Our important discovery in aerial photography and now in satellite imagery is that we can detect the traces of the ancient footpaths that linked villages with cemeteries, and we can date the initiation and cessation of use of the paths by volcanic ash deposits. We discovered that Arenal volcano erupted explosively 10 times in the past 4000 years, providing us with well-dated horizon markers. The ancient footpaths were not intentionally constructed, but rather were formed by generations of people walking single file between cemeteries and graveyards, with erosion gradually entrenching them. We discovered we could detect paths in color infrared airphotos as faint reddish lines that are reflecting slight variations in vegetation in this rainforest environment. We now use the new IKONOS satellite, with imagery provided by Dr. Tom Sever (NASA Huntsville). Sever’s involvement is fortuitous because each scene costs $20,000. The detection of such footpaths had never been done before in archaeology. We now connect cemeteries with villages as well as springs and sources of stone for construction, and have documented the network of ritual pathways.

We have found no archaeological evidence as to why people would separate cemeteries from their villages. However, serendipitously and extraordinarly, a native Costa Rican took my ANTH 1140 “The Maya” class last semester and changed his major to Anthropology. Diego Villalobos is part Bribri Indian and has been trained in traditional religious practices. We are now working closely together as he more deeply explores native belief and practice, and he is exploring rather obscure sources of ethnographic information. He has found that his ancestors believed the spirits of the dead preferred burials at a distance from villages, and the villagers are less anxious when the powerful spirits are not hovering nearby. He is finding that traditional Bribri believe that spirits have trouble finding their graves, so people connect villages with graveyards by strings to guide them. That could explain why the ancient paths we are finding are composed of strikingly straight segments. He will be in Costa Rica this summer and will join our field research. He will explore the similarities between Bribri belief and practice with what we discover in remote sensing and archaeology.

Separate from our research, Ricardo Vazquez, Director of Archaeology of the Costa Rican National Museum, has been excavating the Cutris chiefdom site 50 km east of our Arenal area. He found huge constructed entrenched roadways into the site, and has followed some of them on the ground. Tom Sever purchased an IKONOS satellite scene of Cutris, and we have discovered what appear to be more constructed ancient roadways. The chiefs must have organized hundreds of people to construct and maintain these monumental entryways. And presumably they would have used them for ceremonial processions and perhaps performances. I believe that we may have discovered the origins of that monumentality in the earlier and simpler societies of Arenal, and perhaps the reasons for separating cemetery from village, and routing paths in straight segments.

I wish to unite our Arenal research program with the Cutris program, NASA remote sensing, and native belief and practices. Ricardo Vazquez, Tom Sever, Diego Villalobos, and I plan to hike the apparent newly discovered Cutris roadways and confirm or disconfirm them. William Saturno (Professor, Anthropology, University of New Hampshire) will join us. He is an authority on ancient Central American ritual and belief.

If we are successful this summer in confirming the satellite image anomalies as ancient constructed roadways, and integrating Bribri native belief and ritual as potential explanations for archaeological features, we plan to develop these into a research program. A proposal will be submitted to the National Science Foundation for a 3-year project to explore the possible relationship between earlier Arenal paths and the later monumental entryways into Cutris and other chiefdom sites. It appears that the inadvertent consequence of path erosion and entrenchment in earlier times became a cultural standard, and then was “writ large” by chiefs needing monumentality. We envision a collaborative, interdisciplinary, international research effort.

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