Costa Rican Archaeology and Mesoamerica

Abstract

A BRIEF GLANCE at a linguistic map of Central America (Fig. 1) will make it clear that Costa Rica was aboriginally a frontier country. Within the sub-region which we propose to call Greater Nicoya were a number of languages of purely Mesoamerican affiliation. Chorotegan languages, belonging to the larger Oto-Manguean family centered in southern Mexico, were spoken at the time of the Conquest in a scattered distribution from the Bay of Fonseca down to the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica proper. Moreover, almost all of the Rivas Peninsula as well as Ometepe Island of Nicaragua were occupied by the Nahua-speaking Nicarao; as a matter of fact, scattered enclaves of Nahua speakers were located as far south as the Atlantic coast of Panama.x Both the Nicarao and the Chorotegans stressed that they were not the ancient inhabitants of the region, having arrived not many centuries past from a homeland in Mexico. As confirmation of their own testimony, it should be noted that they were maize farmers, had elaborate markets, wore padded cotton armor, fought with clubs set with small flint blades, practiced human sacrifice and selfmutilation, and had permanent temples. The Nicarao even had the 260-day calendar, the volador ceremony, and a pantheon of Mexican gods. In other words, they were thorough-going Mesoamericans.2 In contrast with Greater Nicoya, in most of Isthmian Central America below the Nicoya Peninsula languages of the Chibchan group, a linguistic family heavily represented in northwestern South America, were spoken. Among these tribes, sweet manioc rivaled maize as a staple, foods were prepared with the mortarand-pestle of wood rather than the familiar metate-mano of Greater Nicoya, and there were many obviously southern traits, such as palisaded villages, the wearing of the penis sheath, drinking bouts during ceremonies, and head-taking. This distribution has suggested to many students that Costa Rica was the real meeting place between the cultures of North and South America. In the original definition of Mesoamerica as proposed by Kirchoff, the boundaries of that great culture area actually dip down to include Greater Nicoya. Now, this makes admirable sense when only the ethnographic present is considered, but a question which logically comes to mind is this: if the Chorotegans and the Nicarao were