Ancient Atlantic siders

No wonder we know more about ancient Panamanians who lived on the Pacific side. You have a longer dry season and easier access if your digs are on Panama’s southern slopes. Climatic conditions on the Pacific side retain the organic changes around disturbed soil, which can clearly mark a grave millennia after the fact, but the heavier Atlantic side rains and acidy red clay relatively quickly erase the different appearance of soil where a person has been buried. Plus the historical record, both at the time of the Spanish Conquest and to this very day, is that there have been fewer people, who would of course leave fewer traces, over on the Atlantic side.

But Dr. John Griggs is an archaeologist who works the Atlantic side, or rather the evergreen forests of the Caribbean slopes of Cocle and Veraguas provinces. He has worked on grants from mining exploration companies and the Panama Canal, and with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He spoke at the Smithsonian’s Tupper Auditorium on November 15, giving those in attendance at the Tuesday afternoon free science lecture series an archaeology break from the usual biological fare.

Griggs thinks that his work in the area has thrown older ideas about the people who settled on the Caribbean slope into question. Basically he’s the third archaeologist to do serious digging on the Atlantic side.

In 1927 the Swede Sigvald Linné worked on the Atlantic side, mostly east of the canal, and two years later published “Darién in the Past: the Archaeology of Eastern Panama and North-western Colombia.” He also dug in Chiriqui and Veraguas provinces, and concluded that the ancient peoples of Panama’s Caribbean slope were weaker tribes who had been driven there from elsewhere.

Matthew Williams Stirling, a Smithsonian archaeologist and chief of the institutions Bureau of American Ethnology, dug on the Caribbean slopes of Veraguas in 1951 but never published his findings.

There is also the evidence first unearthed in a great non-archaeological dig on the Atlantic side --- things found while Gatun Lake was being made as part of the Panama Canal. Some of the stuff found there goes back to 9000 BC, and Griggs thinks that some of the jobo points found there indicate that people were on the scene well before that. However, he said that “we don’t know if these paleo-Indians ventured into the evergreen forests” to the west. Studies at Gatun Lake sites indicate that slash-and-burn corn farming was happening in the Gatun Lake basin at least as long ago as 3000 BC, and Griggs said that he and some of his colleagues suspect that agriculture was being practiced there much earlier than that.

Ecologists studying Panama’s natural history, and particularly its patterns of forestation and deforestation, have also uncovered evidence that archaeologists think useful for their own work. As in forests declining in antiquity, most likely because ancient peoples cut them down to clear land for cultivation.

Panamanian archaeologist Olga Linares worked in many parts of Panama, and on the Atlantic side at digs on Colon’s Costa Arriba near Cuango and in Bocas del Toro. Linares thought that the people on the Costa Arriba dated back to the first millennium BC and had migrated there from northern South America. She believed that the people whose cultural remains she studied in Bocas lived about 500 AD and moved there from the Chiriqui highlands, possible fleeing there from an eruption of Volcan Baru.

There was a belief, never well argued or documented, that the people of northern Veraguas whom Christopher Columbus encountered had made their way along the Caribbean coast from northern South America.

At one site along a tributary creek of the Rio Cocle del Norte, Griggs found “shallow, stratified remnants of cultural artifacts” that were carbon-14 dated from the second millennium BC through the first millennium AD. The people there apparently had a great taste for mangue palm nuts.

At another dig in the Rio Cocle del Norte basin, Griggs found earth ovens dating back to 1,700 BC. The people there were clearly cooking palm seeds, but he’s not sure whether for food or to extract the resins for other uses. There he found microlith tools --- sharp little stones that would have been inserted into boards to make graters --- and the Monagrillo ware variety of pottery, a style of ceramic work previously only found in the central Pacific region of Panama.

Along Rio Indio, Griggs encountered a site that dated back to the beginning of the fifth millennium BC, which had apparently been later abandoned and then settled again close to the time of the European Conquest. There he found a lot of mangue and corocillo palm nuts, a lot of stone tools made by the bipolar reduction method, plus the earliest evidence of polished stone axes in Panama.

Axes, Griggs, says, are almost always associated with agriculture. Thus he doesn’t think he was dealing with hunters and gatherers.

· That migration into the Caribbean slopes of central Panama were underway by at least 5,000 BC, earlier than Linares and some other archaeologists thought.

· That the peoples whose traces he found moved into the area from the south, across the country’s central mountain spine, rather than from the east as some suspected. The findings of Monagrillo pottery on both the Pacific and Caribbean slopes, over a long period of time, indicate to him that the people on both sides of the Continental Divide were of the same culture and that the women who made the pottery moved, intermarried or were abducted or traded between the two cultural areas.

· That the northward movement was prompted by population pressures from the adjacent Pacific slope areas. He notes that the La Yeguada area was largely deforested by about 5000 BC and that farmers would probably have been prompted to search on the other side of the mountains for arable land to till.

· That natural resources on one side or the other of the central cordillera probably gave rise to a trade network that existed at least as far back as 2000 BC and lasted until the European Conquest. Examples he gave included the lack of salt on the Atlantic Side, while gold and manatee ivory found on the Atlantic side but not the Pacific were found at Pacific sites.

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