What happened in Costa Rica? Part I
A historical review of Costa Rica tries to catch some moments of history: uncomplete and selected windows of time. In this part: the first settlers.
There is evidence of human habitation in Costa Rica as early as 10,000 BC in the southern Turrialba Valley. Ceramic artifacts have been dated to 1500 BC, although they are not abundant and widely scattered. From 400 BC to 400 AD, there was a dramatic increase in population, trade, agricultural sophistication, and social complexity. Three distinct cultural zones also emerge around 400 BC: Guanacaste-Nicoya in the drier northwest, the Central Highlands Region, and Diquis in the southwest. The culture of Guanacaste-Nicoya is related to that of the Greater Nicoya Region extending into modern Nicaragua while Diquis was closely tied to the Greater Chiriqui Region in what is now Panama.
In Pre-Columbian times the Indigenous people, in what is now known as Costa Rica, were part of Intermediate Area located between the Mesoamerican and Andean cultural regions. This has recently been updated to include the influence of the Isthmo-Colombian area in the South-Atlantic region of the country, defined by the presence of groups that spoke Chibchan languages. It is still unknown if any of these groups created the famous stone spheres of Costa Rica, between 200 BC and AD 1600.
Mesoamerica is the region extending from central Mexico south to the northwestern border of Costa Rica that gave rise to a group of stratified, culturally related agrarian civilizations spanning an approximately 3,000-year period before the European discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus. Mesoamerican is the adjective generally used to refer to that group of pre-Columbian cultures. This refers to an environmental area occupied by an assortment of ancient cultures that shared religious beliefs, art, architecture, and technology in the Americas for more than three thousand years.
No exact evidence exists to show how long human population has resided in the region of today Costa Rica, but it is generally agreed that the area has been inhabited for at least the past 7,000 years. Those early dwellers in this tropical land were roaming hunter-gatherers. Their movements were likely related to local elimination, or severe decline, in the larger game species populations.
With gained knowledge of the local plant species and their potential use as food, fiber, building material, and medicine, more sedentary populations could be established. The first plants to come into widespread cultivation in the region were corn, yuca and pejibaye. Corn was introduced from northern Central America, the latter two crops are of South American origin.
After 400 AD population centers balkanized into relatively small, rudimentary settlements accompanied by a gradual degradation of the quality of ceramics. Later artifacts point to a strong southern influence, as sculpture, house forms, and burial practices shift drastically to southern styles.(via Wikipedia)
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