Why you have (probably) never heard of the Gulf of Fonseca, and what that means for its archaeology

Thinking about the media, colonialization, nation-building discourses and their impact on the reconstruction of the precolonial past in Southern Central America.

The Gulf of …what?

The Gulf of Fonseca in Central America (map by author)

Fair enough. It is not the biggest of Gulfs, and if you have never been to this neck of the woods, or if you research doesn’t have you poking around Central America, it’s certainly legitimate if the name doesn’t ring a bell. Still, as far as Central American (pre)history is concerned, it is a pretty significant place. Located on the Pacific Coast, and divided between the modern nations of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, the Gulf of Fonseca has been a point of contention for most of its history.

The diverse environments of the Gulf certainly made it a prime location to settle for past dwellers, with the numerous rivers flowing into the Gulf of Fonseca offering travelling opportunities inland and along the Pacific Coast. However, as much as we can hypothesize, we know relatively little about the region’s precolonial settlers compared to other areas in Central America. But where is this poor understanding of the Gulf of Fonseca rooted? Certainly not in the lack of precolonial occupation, as recent research is starting to show (Brown and Vasquez 2014, Gomez 2010, Kolbenstetter 2021, Valdivieso 2006).

Reading into the historiographical void

Part of the answer lies, I would argue, in the early colonialization of Pacific Central America. The first European landing in the Gulf of Fonseca is attributed to Andres Niño, in 1522. However, Niño probably didn’t step off the ship, and his description of the Gulf remained superficial at best. Only a century later does the first elaborate description of the Gulf enter in the books. Fray Alonso Ponce, a Franciscan chronicler, describes a fairly low density of indigenous settlements in the Honduras and Nicaraguan parts of the Gulf, as well as only two inhabited islands in the Gulf (Ponce 1873 [1583]. And while this was written over 150 years after Niño’s first account (never mind that records indicate that 90% of the indigenous population was eradicated within 30 years of conquest), this account somehow sparked the idea this area was barely populated in precolonial times. This idea later persisted for over a century of Central American scholarship, leaving the claim uncontested.

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Sitting right between the influence sphere of the governorships of Nicaragua and Guatemala, the territory of the Gulf became a source of conflict from early on. Records hint at the fact that neither governor, seeing the Gulf as the outer periphery of their territory, really bothered for the land. They did, however, care and fight about the potential riches that were to be acquired through the enslaving of the population (Gomez 2010). Before any record of its indigenous inhabitants appeared, the area was sacked and its inhabitants reduced to slavery. Since then, boundaries have stood in the way of building a precolonial narrative for the Gulf of Fonseca.

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Nation-building and archaeology

In the 1800s, stuck with flimsy borders inherited from imperial Europe, the newly independent states of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua set out their national agendas. Nation-building discourses promoting these agendas soon resulted in territorial conflicts (Benitez Lopez 2018) . Already divided since colonial times and becoming a renewed geostrategic interest, the Gulf landed in the middle of this dispute. Foreign powers interested in the development of a trans-oceanic railway project and in a port on the Pacific certainly played a big part in fueling and maintaining the dispute (Rivas 1934, Squier 1878). Although, legally, the territorial conflict was resolved in 1992 by the International Court of Justice, tensions continued well into the 2000s

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View of the Gulf of Fonseca. The islands are split between El Salvador and Honduras, and are continued source of territorial tensions. (Raul Arias through Wikimedia Commons)

The ghost of these nation-building discourses is still to be seen in the fragmentation of the archaeological narrative. The few existing archaeological studies relate the finds from the West coast of the Gulf to a Salvadoran tradition, finds from the northern side of the Gulf to a Honduran tradition, while archaeologists of Pacific Nicaragua have mostly assumed that the archaeological Greater Nicoyan tradition incorporated the Nicaraguan part of the Gulf of Fonseca, diligently stopping at the border.

Central American archaeology and the media

But nation building discourses and boundaries are not the only ones that have maintained the myth of emptiness in the Gulf of Fonseca. The western media also holds a fair share of responsibility when it comes to misrepresentation of Central America’s past. By now, the idea that monumental archaeology is the only thing sexy enough to promote is well anchored in Central American archaeology. But archaeological scholarship has long fallen victim to this trend as well, leaving the archaeology Gulf of Fonseca and many other regions in Central America in the shadows of the Maya. The issue with this phenomenon is that it has not only resulted in visibility issues on an international level, but also on a local level.  With its strategies, the media has shaped what heritage should be considered of value, leading many communities to believe that there is no value in the archaeology surrounding them.

The need for a local narrative in the global present

Impact of aquaculture on the mangrove wetlands of Honduras 1987-1999 (NASA Earth Observatory)

The Gulf of Fonseca’s contradictory status throughout history, as a contested periphery has left its population one of the poorest in Latin America. Many of its inhabitants rely on a subsistence economy based mostly on traditional lifeways dependent on the environment. The traditional subsistence practices of fishing and mollusk collecting are progressively threatened by climate change, aquaculture and commercial overfishing. The planned development of large port facilities on the coast of El Salvador and on the island of El Tigre in Honduras, while perhaps boosting the regional economy, will come at the expense of the crumbling ecosystem.  Creating a trinational narrative of the Gulf’s precolonial past then holds the potential of raising much needed awareness to the value of landscapes in which people have been living, hidden from global records, for over two thousand years.

Feature Image: Map of the “Gulf of Amapall”, William Hack, 1685.

This blog was originally published under the same name on the Scottish Centre for Global History Blog in July 2021.

Bibliography

Brown, C. and R. G. Vasquez, 2014. Reconocimiento, Prospecciones y Excavaciones en el Departamento de Chinandega, Nicaragua, Temporada 2, Informe Final. Report presented to the Instituto Nicaragüense de Cultura, Managua.

Gomez, E., 2010. The Archaeology of Colonial Period Gulf of Fonseca, Eastern El Salvador. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California Berkeley.

Kolbenstetter, M.M. (forthcoming). The Gulf of Fonseca, Archaeology of. In Claire Smith, (ed.) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer: New York

Valdivieso, F. (ed). 2006. El Golfo de Fonseca: Colección de estudios culturales. San Salvador: Casa de las Academias.

Ponce, A., 1873 [1583]. Relación breve y verdadera de algunas cosas que sucedieron al padre fray Alonso Ponce en las provincias de Nueva España. 2 vols. Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de Calero.

Gomez, E., 2010. The Archaeology of Colonial Period Gulf of Fonseca, Eastern El Salvador. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California Berkeley.

Benitez Lopez, J., 2018. El Golfo de Fonseca como punto geoestratégico en Centroamerica. Mexico: Bonilla Artigas Editores

Rivas, P., 1934. Monografía geográfica e histórica de la isla El Tigre y puerto de Amapala. Tegucigalpa: Talleres Tipógraficos Nacionales.

Squier, E., 1878. The States of Central America. New York.

Not the Aztecs, not the Inca, not the Maya…then who? Doing archaeology in Southern Central America

The public eye suffers from a bad case of tunnel-vision when it come to archaeology in Central America. But archaeology is complicated. So, what are the things you should know and were never told?

One of the first questions I always get when I say I work in Central America is “so, what is that? Like the Maya? The Aztecs? The Inca?”. The tricky thing about this question his how simple people expect the answer to be. The image of temples in the jungle are already in their head, and they just need me to put a name on it. And then come the confused looks when I say that that’s precisely what I can’t do. And then come the follow up “but, they did build temples and stuff?”. Well, let’s say, more often than not, it’s mainly “and stuff””.  And there comes the inescapable confusion, and the dropping excitement. Which is funny, because the reason people lose interest at that point of the conversation is exactly why I got excited about the region in the first place. Because we don’t know. And that’s what this post is all about: showing you the other story of Central America.

Where was that again?

Geolocalization of Mesoamerica, Middle America, and Central America

First of all, I need to clarify what I mean by Central America. The term often incites confusion, as you would expect it to mean the same thing as Middle America or Mesoamerica. Mesoamerica is archaeologically seen as the area that spreads from Central Mexico to parts of Honduras. In archaeology, the denomination of “ Southern (or Lower) Central America”, however, refers to the territory spanning from Honduras down to Panama. Finally, Middle America is more a geographical denomination which encompasses both of the archaeological areas. As you will be able to read later on this blog, maps, frontiers and cultural areas are definitely not something I swear by, this will at least clue you in as to what part of the world I am talking about.

Now that you’ve got the lay of the land, let me give you and idea of why talking about an “archaeology of Central America” isn’t particularly useful: it doesn’t really do justice to the precolonial cultural diversity of the region. Comparing the archaeology of the Pacific coast and the Caribbean coast alone can be a handful. It’s like…comparing the Parthenon to a windmill. I mean, you can do it if you want, but one will have to question the point of such exercise. My point is that talking about Central America equates our talking about Europe: we can do it if we understand that it doesn’t refer to one single homogenous culture.

Then who?

As far as the inhabitants of Central America in precolonial times, saying “it’s complicated” doesn’t begin to cover it.  In my region of focus alone, the Gulf of Fonseca (a relatively small area roughly the size of Luxemburg), we know of names of several ethnic groups living there around the time of conquest: Ulua, Matagalpa, Lenca, Nahuat, Pipiles, Mangue, Chontal, Cacaopera, Potones…And what does that tell us? Well not much at all. Because in the archaeological record, we can rarely tell what material culture was produced by which groups, if they lived separately or intermingled in their settlements, nor how their organization changed over time.  

Aerial view of the Gulf of Fonseca, 1966

One reason why these do names matter however, is because these groups have descendant communities, some of which still identify as Indigenous (the Lenca, for example, still live in El Salvador and parts of southern Honduras). And even if we can’t pinpoint what group lived where, it is (at the very least) essential to recognize that we are investigating their heritage, on their ancestral lands, and that they should have a claim to this knowledge.

So what do you find?

So, what do we find in Central America? As mentioned above, we are looking at a variety of different things. Let’s start with monumentality. Briefly said, there are no temples in much of Central America. But “no temples” doesn’t mean no monumental structures. From central Honduras to the south of Panama, we see various ways of building and arranging settlements. Mounds and platform building for habitations is fairly common. The mounds can take a variety of different shapes and the way they are organized can differ quite heavily (even in neighbouring settlements!).

Artefacts found in a field, Choluteca Province, Honduras

And then, there are the little things we study: potsherds, worked stone, bones and even microscopic plant remains. Pots and rocks are mainly what I do (I’ll get into this later). Because these unsexy things are actually what tell us about the daily lives of people in the past. My main point here is that what we can say about precolonial people doesn’t all come from temples and steles in the jungle.

Truth is, however, that we don’t know that much about it (yet!). And that is exactly what makes it interesting to work there! How did the people living there interact with each other? What did they do in their day-to-day lives? What did they eat, what did they drink? How did they interact with the natural environment that surrounded them? How did they organize politically? What were their religious rituals? How and why did they move around? These are the real archaeological questions!

A world full of possibilities?

Well, here you go. If you made it this far, you officially know more about my research area than my parents do. I guess you could see it as a downside working in an area that has not been investigated much. But I hope you will choose to see it like I do: like a world full of possibilities!

So even if we archaeologists can’t tell you exactly who the people who inhabited Southern Central America were, we can tell you how they lived. And isn’t that just so much cooler than just pretty jungle pictures?