Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2017
Until recently Panamanian archaeology has been essentially descriptive with little attempt at chronological ordering. Outstanding monographs and writings of this nature are those by Holmes (1888), MacCurdy (1911), and Osgood (1935), on the Province of Chiriquí, and Linné (1929) on Darien. In the 1930's the Peabody Museum (Harvard) excavations at Sitio Conte in Coclée Province, central Panama, were devoted largely to the careful uncovering of graves and their contents; but analyses of these collections were not made with an eye to cultural sequence (Lothrop 1937, 1942).
The present study was undertaken during the summer of 1955 under the direction and encouragement of Gordon R. Willey