The Extended
Length of Cultural Time Periods in Greater
Nicoya and California
By Frederick
Lange¹
How old is it? I have been asked this
question countless times, whether addressed
to a ceramic pot, a jade pendant, a gold
pendant, a carved metate, or to an entire
archaeological site.
For all the years I taught in different
universities, in North America and in
Central America, in English and in Spanish,
one of the most difficult tasks I
encountered was the need to convey a sense
of great periods of time. Since most of us
can identify our great-grandparents only
with difficulty, the challenge to comprehend
a thousand years, or more, is even greater.
To try and understand the great time depth
represented by the prehispanic occupation of
northwestern Costa Rica and southwestern
Nicaragua, this article employs a
“comparative world history” approach,
briefly relating events in Greater Nicoya’s
development to events in the rest of the
world.
For example, by the beginning of the Orosi
Period in Greater Nicoya 3,500 years ago,
the Great Pyramids of Egypt had already been
built, the Great Wall of China built, and
the first civilizations in Mexico, Peru,
Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and Anatolia had
developed.
By the time (1500-1200 years ago, the
Bagaces Period in Grater Nicoya) that
Greater Nicoya was beginning to have
permanent villages of perhaps 500 people,
London was a city of 10,000 people. By
1200-800 years ago (the Sapoa Period in
Greater Nicoya) the cliff dwellings at Mesa
Verde were built and occupied, and
approximately 500 years ago (the Ometepe
Period in Greater Nicoya) Columbus reached
the Americas.
Following this brief historic summary, this
article attempts to explain why the cultural
periods in Greater Nicoya are all so long:
as shown in the table below, all of them are
longer than the history of the United
States, and the Bagaces, Tempisque, and
Orosi Periods in Greater Nicoya and all of
the periods in southern California were
longer than the amount of time that has
elapsed since Columbus arrived in the
Western Hemisphere.
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