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<< Other Photo Pages >> Casita de Piedra - Cave or Rock Shelter in Panama

Submitted by coldrum on Saturday, 26 January 2013  Page Views: 5730

Natural PlacesSite Name: Casita de Piedra Alternative Name: BO-1
Country: Panama
NOTE: This site is 25.08 km away from the location you searched for.

Type: Cave or Rock Shelter
Nearest Town: Boquete
Latitude: 8.742222N  Longitude: 82.285556W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
4 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
1 Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
5

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Casita de Piedra
Casita de Piedra submitted by Andy B : The cache stones: a) stone 1, small dacite cylinder; b) stone 2, white quartz; c) stone 3, bladed quartz and jarosite aggregate - not all fragments shown; d) stone 4, quartz crystal aggregate; e) stone 5: rounded pyrite nodule; f) stone 6, small chalcedony stone; g) stones 7 and 8, elongated pyrite nodule with cavity; h) stone 9, grey andesite flake; i) stone 10, chalce- dony vein; j) stone ... (Vote or comment on this photo)
Rock Shelter in Panama. Archaeologists have discovered a cluster of 12 unusual stones in the back of a small, prehistoric rock shelter near the town of Boquete. The research suggests they are the earliest material evidence of shamanistic practice in lower Central America.

Casita de Piedra is a small rock shelter situated on the Pacific slope of the Central Cordillera of Western Panama, in the province of Chiriquí. It is located 37 km north of the provincial capital David and 17 km east of the town of Boquete. The shelter is formed by the overhang of a huge granitic boulder, which provides approximately 24 m2of floor space behind the dripline.

Ruth Dickau, a Leverhulme post-doctoral fellow at the University of Exeter in England unearthed the cache of stones in the Casita de Piedra rock shelter in 2007, while based at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. A piece of charcoal found directly underneath the cache was radiocarbon dated to 4,800 years ago. A second fragment of charcoal in a level above the cached was dated to 4,000 years ago.

One of the stones (the dacite) was humanly modified into the shape of a cylinder and the three pyrite stones show evidence of use. The variety of lithologies represented indicates that the stones came from multiple geological contexts outside the immediate vicinity of the rockshelter, but probably within the young volcanic belt of western Panama.

The researchers propose that these stones were specially selected for specific practitioners of a ritual, in a small-scale society that probably moved residence frequently.

“There was no evidence of a disturbance or pit feature to suggest someone had come along, dug a hole and buried the stones at a later date,” Dickau said. “The fact that the stones were found in a tight pile suggests they were probably deposited inside a bag or basket, which subsequently decomposed.”

Indigenous groups who lived near this site include the Ngäbe, Buglé, Bribri and Cabécar, and the now-extinct Dorasque peoples. Shamans or healers (curanderos) belonging to these and other present-day first Americans in Central and South America often include special stones among the objects they use for ritual practices. Stones containing crystal structures are linked to transformative experiences in many of their stories.

Anthony Ranere from Temple University in Philadelphia first identified and excavated Casita de Piedra in an archaeological survey of western Panama in the early 1970s. He found that the small rockshelter had been repeatedly occupied over thousands of years and used for a variety of domestic activities. Dickau returned to the site to expand excavations from December 2006 to January 2007.

Dickau's group radiocarbon dated charcoal from the base levels of the shelter and discovered it was first occupied more than 9,000 years ago, much earlier than Ranere originally proposed. Her research also showed that the people who would have benefitted from the shaman's knowledge practiced small-scale farming.

This research project was authorized by Panama's National Institute of Culture and funded by the Smithsonian and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Source: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Read the full paper here (PDF), 10MB
A 4,000-year-old shaman’s stone cache at Casita de Piedra, western Panama
Dickau, R., Redwood, S.D., Cooke, R.G. 2012.
Archaeol Anthropol Sci. doi 10.1007/s12520-012-0112-5
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Casita de Piedra
Casita de Piedra submitted by Andy B : Casita de Piedra rock shelter Photo credit: Ruth Dickau, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Site in Panama (Vote or comment on this photo)

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