| Abstract: |
The Zapotal Site (He-15), is a an early Ceramic-A, coastal shell midden located in the Azuero Peninsula of central Pacific Panama. During the 1999 field season, under the direction of Dr. Lynette Noff, crewmembers excavated a 50cm x 50cm <italic>sondeo</italic>, that captured the cultural sequence deposited at the southern end of the site. It is from this context that the faunal assemblage for this project was recovered. The purpose of this project is to study the relationships between resource-use in a subsistence-based economy, habitat exploitation, procurement technologies, and patterns of group mobility and settlement. Zapotal is a suitable choice for asking and answering questions related to subsistence because of the excellent preservation and quantity of faunal remains recovered, as well as methods used to recover both vertebrate and invertebrate food remains. I addressed some specific research questions with the zooarchaeological assemblage from Zapotal are: (1) What ecological niches were the inhabitants of Zapotal using in relationship to their home base? (2) Was long-range planning involved in choosing specific resources for exploitation? (3) What do the represented taxa from the archaeological record tell us about residential mobility and settlement patterns in the area? The data show that during the deposition of the shell midden, there was an increase in the exploitation of local resources and deposition of those remains at the site. This conclusion is based on density of the deposits, and the large sample size recovered from the midden period. The people who used Zapotal to extract and process aquatic vertebrates and invertebrates favored species that regularly occurred in the estuaries or in the shallow near-shore waters of Parita Bay. The site's location was advantageous because of its proximity to critical resources like potable water, firewood, and food. The occupations may have been short-term fishing forays by specialized detachments of collectors that belonged to a larger group of agriculturalists that lived at more inland locales. These smaller collecting groups may have fished at the coast during the dry season when the agricultural plots were laying fallow.
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