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THE PRE-COLUMBIAN PANAMA - Coggle Diagram

- - - - • HUNTING, GATHERING AND FISHING (10,000 to 3,000 BC). It is the oldest period, known as the Stone Age (Upper Palaeolithic). Man lived as a nomad and depended on the fruits that he could gather from wild plants, on fishing, on shells and mammals that he could hunt.
        • FORMATIVE AGRICULTURE (3,000 TO 1,500 BC). The man continues his evolution and passes to an agriculture of tubers.
        • ESTABLISHED AGRICULTURE (1,500 to 300 BC). According to the author, for this time there is undoubted intensive corn agriculture in Panama (main crop), associated with common bean crops and probably avocado. This allows the Panamanian man to settle and go from an initial or formative agriculture to an established agriculture, which favors the sedentarization and the existence of small villages, thus initiating the formation of the great chiefdoms that are later organized.
        • EXTENSIVE AGRICULTURE (300 BC until the Conquest). This stage coincides with the arrival of the Spanish conquerors. Panamanian men occupied large organized rural agricultural villages, which had a high population density. Once the Europeans arrived, this situation did not last long, since in the first decades, most of the indigenous peoples had disappeared.
- - - - The Kuna culture managed to establish itself during the 16th century in the Bayano and Darien region, as the original population of the area was decimated.
        Starting in the 18th century, the area is occupied by the Chocoe culture, apparently originating from the current Department of Chocó in the Republic of Colombia.
        Before the 18th century, the Darien region (currently part of the Republic of Panama), was inhabited by the Kuna Indians and not Chocoes. Probably from the pre-Columbian period, the Embera indigenous people inhabited the southeastern part of Darién.
- - - - Agriculture Let's go back to La Yeguada to introduce the following process: the domestication of plants whose millenary development in the American tropics led to the kind of agriculture that was witnessed and described by Spanish chroniclers in the 16th century of our era.
        Continual and increasingly intense deforestation shows that some people remained there burning the forest until, by 5000 BC, there were few trees left in the basin. This panorama suggests that slash agriculture was already practiced in this area, that is, the vegetation that fell in the summer was burned to sow at the beginning of the rains.
        Although there are data that affirm the great antiquity of agriculture in the isthmus, the varieties of plants that would have been cultivated in open clearings in the foothills near the 'stone houses' between 6000 and 1000 BC. They were not as productive, nor as adaptable, as those that the Spanish knew when they arrived in America.
        Tours carried out along the Santa María river and on the Caribbean slope in the Coclé del Norte river basin by John Griggs, Luís Alberto Sánchez and Diana Carvajal have verified the paleoecological data obtained in La Yeguada and in the lower reaches of the Chagres river ( Gatun Lake) when pointing out that people who used ceramics of the style called 'Monagrillo' - the oldest in the isthmus - had already spread through the central Caribbean about 2000 years BC (Bartlett and Barghoorn, 1973; Piperno, 1985; Cooke and Ranere, 1984, 1992b, c; Griggs, 1998; Griggs et al., 2002).
        
        Other paleoecological research this time conducted near the ancient Cana mine in eastern Darien showed that, by 2000 BC, this remote area was also inhabited by farmers who were familiar with corn (Bush and Colinvaux, 1994; Piperno, 1994) - a This fact is of great interest because the only archaeological field work carried out in the upper basin of the Tuyra River dates back to the 19th century (Catat, 1889).
        As of this date, agricultural activities regularly disturbed the vegetation until, as in the Veragüense mountain range, the withdrawal of indigenous farmers allowed the definitive return of the forest (Cooke et al., 1996).
        
        Hunting, fishing and gathering Of course, agriculture was not the only subsistence activity that the indigenous people practiced at this time.
        They also hunted, fished, and collected shells, crabs, and wild fruits. The most detailed information on these trades comes from archaeological sites located in the 'dry arch', an area where the aridity and the chemistry of the soils of the geological substrate help to preserve the organic remains that provide us with information on the pre-Columbian diet.
        In places such as Cerro Mangote (5000-3000 BC), and Monagrillo (2400-1200 BC), located on the shores of the productive Bay of Parita, the importance of hunting deer, iguanas, raccoons and coastal birds has been verified through archaeozoological analysis. fishing in estuaries and sandy beaches; and harvesting of shells and crabs (Cooke, 1995; Cooke and Ranere 1994, 1999; McGimsey, 1956; McGimsey et al., 1987; Willey and McGimsey, 1954).
        These two sites were closer to the coastline than at present because the deltas of the Santa María and Parita rivers at whose mouths they were located had not yet formed.
        It should be noted, however, differences at the cultural level in different regions of the isthmus, since in 'stone houses' and open-air camps located in the Chirican mountain range, Anthony Ranere and Richard Cooke found basalt utensils descended from the 'Clovis' and dated between 4600 and 2300 BC, whose owners lived in the humid forests and which differ widely from the contemporary lithic assemblages found in Central Panama.
        It appears that the life of gatherers and hunters survived for quite some time in that area that was unsuitable for slash farming (Ranere, 1980a-d; Ranere and Cooke, 1995, 1996).
        
        Contemporary sites located in the foothills, further from the coast, carried out other activities. For example, the inhabitants of the Aguadulce Shelter spent a lot of time searching for freshwater turtles (Kinosternon, Trachemys) and collecting corozos (Elaeis, Acrocomia) (Cooke and Ranere, 1992a, b).
        Findings of the bones of small estuary fish such as arengas (Opisthonema), peyorras (Ilisha furthii), orquetas (Chloroscombrus orqueta) and kermes oak (Ophioscion typicus) in other places more distant from the sea, allow us to infer that the custom of salting or smoking fish on the coast itself for transport inland, where animal protein is scarce, dates back to 2000 BC or beyond (Cooke, 2001b; Cooke and Tapia, 1994; Zohar and Cooke, 1997).
        Findings of manatee ribs at Cerro Mangote indicate that the shipment of the bones of these large aquatic mammals from the Caribbean to communities on the Pacific coast dates back to 4000 BC. In more recent times, they were carved obtaining beautiful pieces which accompanied the graves of important people.
  - - - Male power In the Sitio Conte cemetery, whose investigated area spans from 700 to 950 AD, almost all of the 100 skeletons found by archaeologists Samuel Lothrop and Alden Mason between 1930 and 1940 are adults and 80% of these male. Without exception, the most important and wealthy people buried in this cemetery were male.
        There is no evidence of rich women and children, which suggests that power was not hereditary and that politics was controlled by men who, judging by the content of pre-Columbian art and what the chroniclers tell us, were constantly competing with each other. yes (Briggs, 1989; Cooke et al., in press, a; Linares, 1977b; Lothrop, 1937, 1942).
        
        Artifacts and territories: a difficult matter to interpret The set of artifacts found at Sitio Conte shows a particular "style" that combines motifs and icons in distinctive ways (Lothrop, 1937, 1942).
        It is obvious that this striking semiotic system, whose transformations over time are already quite well known and dated (Figure 10; Cooke et al., 2000; Labbé, 1995; Sánchez, 1995, 2000), was aimed at a much broader territory. that those that would have dominated most of the hundreds of "señoríos" or "cacicazgos" described by the Spaniards.
        From the Gulf of Montijo to the central coast of the Bay of Panama and on the opposite side of the Caribbean (Griggs, 1995, 1998) thousands of settlements, small and large, rich and poor, used and exchanged the same amulets, ornaments, vessels and weapons decorated from the same symbolic system.
        The set of objects and icons in this area - called 'Gran Coclé' by archaeologists (Sánchez, 2000) - is distinguished from another that, likewise from 500 BC, came to characterize the area that ranges from the Tabasará River to the Valle del General in Costa Rica, called 'Gran Chiriquí' (Corrales, 2000; Drolet, 1984a, b, 1986, 1988, 1992; Haberland, 1984; Holmes, 1888; Linares de Sapir, 1968; Linares and Ranere, editores, 1980 ; Shelton, 1984). In the east, a third cultural area has been proposed, 'Greater Darien', to which we will refer later.
        
        Ceremonial centers The fact that Sitio Conte adjoins Cerro Cerrezuela, where there is evidence of stone-lined terraces and El Caño Archaeological Park, whose arrangements of carved and uncarved basalt columns are well known (Cooke, 1976a ; Cooke and Ranere, 1992c; Fitzgerald, 1991, 1998; Torres de Araúz and Velarde, 1998), suggests that these three sites together performed the function of a site of special ritual and social importance, not only for the caciques and villages of this region. interfluvian, but for a much larger population - perhaps all 'Gran Coclé' where a similar site has never been found.
        
        The care of the ancestors One of the most striking customs of the entire region inhabited by speakers of Chibchense and Chocoano languages is the protection that was given - and in some cases, that is still granted - to the preparation of the rites funerals of the ancestors and the effort made to preserve their physical remains through embalming, drying and resting in mortuary houses.
        Both at Sitio Conte and Cerro Juan Díaz, the burial vaults were kept open, covered with roofs and sheets of bark cloth in order to receive the dead of a single family for several generations (Lothrop, 1937; Cooke et al. , 2000; Díaz, 1999; Sánchez, 1995).
- - - - The extermination to which the population that occupied the Bayano and Darién region is subjected, allows that during the 16th century this area was occupied by the Kuna culture and much later, from the 18th century onwards, by the Chocoe culture, of the language Emberá and Waunana, the latter, come from the Urabá and Chocó regions.
        According to PETER H. HERLIHY, the Emberá and Wounan Indians lived mainly in the territory of what is now known as the Department of Chocó in the Republic of Colombia. Both groups have a similar culture and history.
        Before the 18th century, the Darien region (today in the Republic of Panama), was inhabited by the Kuna Indians and not Chocoes. It is probable that since pre-Columbian times, the Emberá inhabited the south-eastern part of the Darién.
        D u rating the seventeenth century, the Kuna populations threatened Spanish expectations of colonizing the region. From 1719 to 1726, the Kuna of the Darien fought against Spanish domination. They collaborated with the pirates, hiding them in the rivers of the area to attack the Spanish. Faced with such a threat, by 1783, the Crown issued a Royal Order for the "reduction" or "extinction" of the Kuna.
        The Spaniards employed the Chocoes Indians of Colombia, who, armed with blowguns and poison darts, formed a "shock army." United with the blacks and Spaniards, they managed to drive the Kuna to the headwaters of the Chucunaque and Tuira rivers.
        
        It is important to emphasize, as does Dr. Reina Torres De Arauz, that it is not possible to point out that the current cultural groups that currently exist in Panama are direct descendants of the indigenous cultures that were in the Isthmus at the time of the conquest. .
        Considering that the trauma produced by the European conquest led to the massive disappearance of indigenous groups and the migration of others, it is impossible to claim, without further archaeological and ethnological evidence, that the Kuna are descendants of the Caves and that the Guaymíes are descendants of the cultures that inhabited the Central Provinces.
        It is probable that the remnants of the isthmic indigenous populations were absorbed by other indigenous groups from the curricum-Caribbean sector, the Colombian Pacific coast and the Talamanca Zone of Costa Rica.
        On the other hand, the Spanish missionaries and colonizers, with their reduction of Indians and the founding of towns, as well as the importation of Indian slaves from Central and South America, introduced indigenous people of various linguistic-cultural affiliations in the 16th and 17th centuries.
        All this led to the disappearance of cultures and the amalgamation of others, which would have been based on the remnant of aboriginal groups in the region.