Ancient Costa Rica Pt. 2: The narrow road to Guayabo

Submitted by coldrum on Sunday, 17 January 2010 Page Views: 1482

1000 years ago, there wouldn't have been much jungle, just terraced plots of maize and clear view off the mountain to the valley far below. Visitors got a dizzying look at the drop from either side of a road that lurched up along the back of a steep ridge. They'd find themselves funneled into a stairway shadowed by stone walls and tall guard houses. Up the steps, a paved causeway stretched ahead, its edges lined with sculptures and the piked heads of conquered enemies.
The modern entrance to the ancient city of Guayabo is not nearly so dramatic.
A fascinating article by Maggie Koerth-Baker tells you more:

There's a gravel road up a mountain, with chasms that threaten to swallow the front wheel of our little Honda. A ticket booth marks the spot were you park the car on the roadside. Carefully maintained nature trails wind through rainforest less than a century old and spit you out in the center of what was once a city of several thousand inhabitants.

Guayabo ("Why-ahbo") is one of many ancient cities in Costa Rica that get overlooked by the public, largely because their builders worked mostly with materials—wood, thatch, cane—that disintegrated in the tropical climate. But the stone foundations, roads, tombs and aqueduct systems that remain are impressive enough to be named an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

I traveled to Guayabo with Michael Snarskis, Ph.D., an archaeologist who has spent his career living and working in Costa Rica. Although Guayabo had been known since the 1800s, true archaeology didn't begin there until the late 1960s. When Snarskis first visited the site in the 1970s, it was still mostly cow pasture. Today, the central part of the city has been cleared and a stretch of the main entry road restored. At the city's heart is a piece of urban design that Snarskis said was common to ancient Costa Rica -
"You had the main road that led into the city and ended at the stairway of the chiefs' house, after passing through a sunken plaza. The plaza is quite a bit lower actually, because it's the pit left behind by digging earth fill for the principal mounds. The caciques, Spanish for chiefs, would all have lived in the house on the tallest mound. And the secondary mound would have been for the wives and female slaves who took care of their domestic maintenance. The Spanish, when they first arrived, actually described this same basic design and the division of residence by sex at other places in Costa Rica, though they never made it to Guayabo," Snarskis said.

Around what Snarskis calls the "elite precinct" are lower house mounds, plazas and pathways and the stone rings that once formed the foundations of commoners' houses. Standing there today, the city seems too small to have packed in a peak population of several thousand, but, Snarskis points out, you have to remember that only 1/4 to a 1/3 of Guayabo is visible. The jungle on all sides is littered with house foundations and tombs, which have never been fully excavated. In a way, most of Guayabo is still a lost city, waiting to be discovered.

All the remains are stone: Either car tire-sized river cobbles hauled up from far-flung valleys or massive lajas—slabs of volcanic flagstone. Snarskis said the river cobbles were probably hauled up the mountain one-by-one in slings over the backs of workers and slaves. The flagstones would have been even more difficult to pry out of the ground and move— there weren't any pack animals around.

The work that went into building Guayabo is also important, because it proves the existence of a fairly complex political system. Leaders need a sophisticated power structure backing them up to get monuments like this built. Without it, orders like, "Hey, I really think you should carry that 200-pound rock uphill for several miles," tend to get ignored.

Nor were the Chibchan people technologically deficient—they were excellent engineers. Guayabo sits between two streams, tapped to bring fresh water into the city center. Aqueducts criss-cross the city, in exposed stone-lined trenches and under the cobblestone-paved streets. Some of these have been running continuously since they were built a millennium ago.

So far, Guayabo is the only ancient city in Costa Rica open to tourists. But there are others out there.

For much more, including photographs of the site, see http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/12/ancient-costa-rica-p-1.html.

Contributor Bio for coldrum: Based in Milkyway, contributing since 2002. Favourite site: Avebury.

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