| Prehistoric
Footpaths In Costa Rica Indicate
Intimate Ties With Villages,
Cemeteries
New
findings by the University of Colorado
at Boulder indicate tiny footpaths
traveled by Costa Rican people 1,500
years ago were precursors to wide,
deep and ritualistic roadways 500
years later leading to and from
cemeteries and villages.
During
the past two years, a team of graduate
students, NASA archaeologists and
remote sensing specialists led by
Professor Payson Sheets spent much of
their time mapping the small
footpaths, many of which are invisible
on the ground but visible by
satellites. The team noticed portions
of some footpaths were worn up to 3
meters deep by people who had trod
them over the centuries approaching
some of the cemeteries.
"People
traveling such a path would see
nothing of the cemetery until they
actually entered it," said
Sheets. "I suspect,
inadvertently, this developed into a
cultural expectation, a norm, that
gained religious importance as the
proper way to enter and exit a
cemetery."
The
team also found a "sub-path"
-- a perpendicular spur off the main
path -- that went straight up a
hillside. The top of that hill is the
only locality in the region from which
people could view a particular
cemetery known as Silencio from afar.
In one case a village and a cemetery
less than a mile apart had a hill in
between them.
Instead
of taking the path of least resistance
and walking around the hill, they
plodded up and over the top of the
hill, creating a straight, deeply worn
path opening right into the cemetery
entrance, said Sheets.
A good
example is the Poma cemetery in the
Arenal Volcano region in the northwest
Costa Rican rainforest, he said.
There, two parallel footpaths eroded
down about 2 meters, which eventually
melded into one path and provided
"entrenched exit and entry to the
cemetery." Next year the team
plans to trace the footpath back to
the village of origin.
Sheets
believes this beeline style to enter
and exit cemeteries and villages
became widespread over the centuries,
when more complex societies took it to
a higher level by constructing long,
sunken roadways entering and exiting
villages and cemeteries. A primary
roadway from the Cutris site, for
instance, which runs straight for many
kilometers from the center, was
excavated and found to be 30 meters to
40 meters wide and 3 meters to 4
meters deep as it entered the chiefdom
center, home of the elite village
rulers.
"It
appears that the cemetery was not the
only sacred place, but so was the
territory between the village and the
cemetery, and the proper path use was
to access the cemetery along precisely
the same path used by their
ancestors," he said. "The
process of entering and leaving
cemeteries was part of a belief system
that included ceremonial feasting,
tomb construction and the breaking of
special pottery, grinding stones and
other ritual activities at the
cemeteries," said Sheets.
Images
of the tiny footpaths, some 1,500
years old, were made by a NASA
aircraft and the commercial satellite,
IKONOS, equipped with instruments that
can "see" in the light
spectrum invisible to humans. The
infrared cameras picked up a unique
"signature" that caused the
paths to show up as thin red lines in
the images.
Packing
satellite data and GPS satellite
receivers, Sheets, NASA archaeologist
Tom Sever, NASA remote-sensing
specialist Dan Irwin and CU students
Errin Weller, Michelle Butler and
Devin White took off on the trail of
the ancient ones last summer.
One
surprise was that about 90 percent of
the ancient pottery sherds from the
cemeteries apparently were brought in
by people on the Pacific side of the
drainage who toted them on paths to
the cemetery.
"This
is a fascinating situation," said
Sheets. "It appears these people
may have had a much more complex
network of social, economic and
religious contact between isolated
villages on both sides of the divide
than we would have expected."
The
sherds evidence collected in late July
indicated ceremonial funerals and
elaborate feasting after burial --
which included cooking, eating,
drinking, sleeping and the smashing of
elaborate pots and stones on graves --
may have included very disparate
groups.
"My
research interests include
understanding the everyday lives of
ancient people and applying
remote-sensing techniques to locate
prehistoric sites," said doctoral
student Errin Weller. "My
experiences in central Costa Rica with
CU-Boulder and NASA participants
provided a singular opportunity to
combine the use of high-resolution
satellite imagery and
archaeology."
Master's
student Michelle Butler who plotted
specific points along the footpath
with GPS satellite receivers as part
of her work, said the high-tech tools
have a huge future in archaeology.
"Being able to pinpoint paths and
cemeteries used by people over 1,000
years ago is exciting work, and helps
us develop a much better picture of
who these people were and how they
used the landscape."
Email
this page to a Friend
| 
