This two-volume site report describes 14 years (2004–2018) of archaeological research at El Caño in the province of Coclé, Panamá. The editor, Julia Mayo Torné, is the creator and director of the ongoing El Caño Archaeological Project, which focuses on the period from AD 700 to 1000 at El Caño. Volume I meticulously documents the excavations, and Volume II presents inventories of organic and inorganic finds, with ceramic materials the responsibility of Carlos Mayo Torné. From the outset, Julia Mayo Torné situated her research within concepts of scaled social complexity and human–environment interactions in a chiefly society, themes of many earlier publications about ancient Panama. This publication, focused on data presentation, contains minimal theoretical discussion. However, the El Caño team has published regularly in peer-reviewed literature, and readers who wish to understand Mayo Torné's avowed theoretical umbrella can find ample additional material. The methodology applied to the excavations and the recording of the results for posterity are laudably state of the art. One hopes this site report will reset standards for research in Panama, especially on sites of the size and complexity of El Caño.
Mayo Torné began research at El Caño as a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute postdoctoral fellow in 2004. Her fieldwork got underway with pedestrian and geophysical surveys, prerequisites for identifying those spaces that offered the highest potential for excavation. She dedicated nine field campaigns to meticulously excavating seven elite graves, each containing multiple occupants; five of these graves were particularly informative. The discovery of prehispanic burials replete with fine prehispanic artworks in the heavily looted landscape of central Pacific Panama was truly remarkable.
El Caño first entered the gray literature in the 1920s. Elongated basalt columns sculpted into abstract male humans drew the attention of Alpheus Hyatt Verrill in 1925 (I:31, Figures 2.1–2.4). Verrill excavated quickly and in a disorderly manner using a large, untrained workforce. His zany description of a volcano spewing ejecta over a “temple” delineated by rows of columns and smaller sculptures convinced the editors of the Illustrated London News to print his story. Verrill shipped many of his finds to the Heye Foundation, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian Institution. Julia and Carlos Mayo Torné have increased knowledge about and visibility of El Caño sculpture, teaming up with Vicky Karas to apply three-dimensional imaging to record the many examples at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center in Maryland. The complete inventory (Table 1:32–42) augments Wolfgang Haberland's valuable 1973 analysis.
Coinciding with Verrill's desecration of El Caño, agents from Harvard University began negotiations with the Conte family over a potentially rich site in their property, later known as Sitio Conte. Around 1900, a sudden change of course of the Río Grande del Sur exposed mortuary features disgorging goldwork and chromatically distinctive pottery. Antiquities collectors realized that artifacts of a new Coclé culture would be manna to the competitive museum directors of the world's great cultural metropoles. Harvard began excavations at Sitio Conte in 1931 after agreeing to divide the finds with the Conte family. Samuel Kirkland Lothrop acknowledged Verrill's findings at El Caño and in 1937 published a clear plan of the “temple” (Coclé, an Archaeological Study of Central Panama, Part 1: Memoirs). Henceforth, when archaeologists thought of Coclé, they invariably thought of Sitio Conte.
However, El Caño was largely ignored until March 1973, when Reina Torres de Araúz, director of the Institute of Culture halted the threatened destruction of late prehispanic mounds by a local cane sugar company. El Caño was given the status of a national park in 1979. Between 1983 and 1985, Roberto Lleras (now of the Museo del Oro, Bogotá) and Guatemalan Ernesto Barillas uncovered a burial ground alongside Mound 4 in Area 2 at El Caño. It proved to have burials coeval with but socially lower ranked than those in the elite cemetery in Area 1.
Some authors of peer-reviewed articles written prior to Mayo Torné's project hypothesized that El Caño functioned as a ceremonial site reserved for descent-group commemorative events akin to the balsería, a Ngäbé pole-throwing game still played today. They interpreted nearby Sitio Conte as the apex site of a chiefdom in which rich and high-ranked descent-group members were laid to rest. However, Mayo Torné's research team has demonstrated that El Caño housed a managed burial precinct for elite personages. It is gratifying how diligently Mayo's research team recorded the procedures that were applied to extract pristine archaeological evidence from its original resting place, thereby ensuring that their knowledge and experience can be applied to other well-preserved sites of this nature.
A primary hypothesis of this site report is that Sitio Conte and El Caño are two independent archaeological sites, even though they are close to each other and their cultural contents are strikingly similar (I:52; II:161). The sites are separated by only 2,500 m, a morning stroll in the dry season. That this space functioned as a boundary between two coeval and possibly rivalrous social units is open to question. In this environment, however, ease of mobility in the four-month period of strong winds and sunny days is radically easier than during the remainder of the year, when rivers and streams flood. Both sites are in the interfluve between three rivers, each of which rises in the narrow mountain chain (“Cordillera Central”) and coalesces into a single, diachronically wavering channel that enters the mangrove-bordered shore of Parita Bay before opening out to the wider expanse of Panama Bay. These two sites’ location between land and ocean is one reason for the variety and frequency of marine coastal creatures in the iconography of Greater Coclé art. For example, the Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) has been identified in the art of El Caño, but not at Sitio Conte. El Caño continued in use for more than 500 years, when the sociopolitical center of gravity in the Plains of Coclé interfluve switched to the colonial and extant town of Natá on the banks of the Río Chico, by which time human burial in earthen mounds (often in ceramic urns) prevailed, as reported by R. G. Cooke and colleagues (“Contextualized Goldwork from Gran Coclé, Panama,” in Precolumbian Gold: Technology, Style and Iconography, 2000).
In Volume I, 148 crystal-clear photographs and 54 masterly line drawings of floor plans, stratigraphic profiles, and summaries based on Harris matrices epitomize the excellence of the recording strategy. Mayo Torné presents stratigraphic units in Table 3 and a roster of human skeletons from five graves in Table 4. Graves 5 and 6 belong to the first ceramic phase but were heavily disturbed by subsequent burial activities; only three adults of indeterminate sex survived. These graves are much simpler structurally than later ones. Five more-or-less intact graves (1, 2, 4, 7, and 8) belong to the second ceramic phase. Grave 2 was occupied almost exclusively by adult males (26 of 27). Grave 7 is the least heavily biased toward adult males, with 15 subadults and 6 adult females; there are no children. The interpretation that these graves were reserved for fighting-age warriors is thus supported. One can but speculate about the social roles of women and subadults. In my opinion, it is looking increasingly likely that military confrontations increased suddenly in the Pacific lowlands about AD 700; figuring out why is an important research question. The same may well be true for highland Chiriqui, where Barriles's iconography suggests interpretations of conflict and site distribution alludes to mutual hostility among formerly united polities in geographically circumscribed valleys (see Olga Linares, “Prehistoric Agriculture in Tropical Highlands,” Science 187).
Burial grounds dating to AD 200–600 at the sites of Cerro Juan Diaz, 1–2 km inland straddling Herrera and Los Santos provinces; Sitio Sierra, 12 km inland in Coclé province; and Playa Venado, on the coast of West Panama province, present a considerably more equitable distribution among the sexes in funerary contexts (Nicole Smith-Guzmán and Richard G. Cooke, “Interpersonal Violence at Playa Venado, Panama (550–850 AD),” Latin American Antiquity 29: Figure 7). A strong bias toward male interments akin to El Caño and Sitio Conte characterizes the samples from Panama Viejo in later prehispanic times. Statistical manipulations should be able to factor in space, time, sex, age, and place. The El Caño Project sets new standards of field research and laboratory analysis for archaeology in Panama that tackles late and complex sites, which these days are invariably heavily looted. It is gratifying that interested Panamanians, especially the younger generations, can—thanks to Julia Mayo Torné and her team—now be imbued with an important part of their cultural heritage without traveling abroad. They can learn from the methodology of this intelligently conceived and excellently executed project whose didactic innovations are widely accessible for academic use and public appreciation—not only from hard-copy project publications such as this one but also the extensive project website (http://oda-fec.org/nata-english/view/paginas/view_paginas.php). The recent creation of a Ministry of Culture and its embedded Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Arqueológicas y Culturales raises hopes for a new era for academic archaeology and heritage site protection in Panama.
