The project has documented the presence and roles of under-studied agents on the early colonial isthmus of Panama, with particular attention to the alimentary, cultural and economic strategies pursued. The archaeological recovery of the remains of significant numbers of female individuals of African, Indigenous American and mixed descent buried in the Cathedral nave at Panama Viejo, interpreted using historical sources and further corroborated by isotopic and ancient DNA analysis, challenges previous historiographic interpretations. It has also transformed popular awareness of the site and its meaning.
While ArtEmpire has shed light on the social and geographic mobility of women of diverse backgrounds, it has also addressed questions regarding Indigenous American populations before contact with different groups of Europeans and Africans. In the framework of this project, ancient DNA, and particularly the human nuclear genome, has been extracted and sequenced from the region’s pre-Hispanic and colonial inhabitants for the first time. The results illuminate long-standing debates regarding specific burials at Panama Viejo, highlight genetic continuities from pre-Hispanic times to the present, and point to divergent demographic trends among Indigenous groups, some of whom led processes of population contraction that began long before the sixteenth century and precocious recovery into the seventeenth century.
Changes in the ecology and diet at Panama Viejo --- with the spread of cattle, the Asian banana and African rice -- reflect cultural and social interaction among peoples of different ancestries and origins. While reporting no evidence of dietary distinctions based on sex or ancestry, the team has documented gradual shifts in local dietary strategies from pre-Hispanic times to the seventeenth century. On the other hand, Panama Viejo’s European inhabitants appear to have suffered from infectious disease and other conditions associated with nutritional stress slightly more than individuals identified as most likely having Indigenous American or African ancestors. Illuminating the roles of individuals previously considered marginal, such findings suggest that survivors adapted to the resources available, while confronting frequent epidemiological challenges on an artery of early global transport.
Rather than separate, even competing Atlantic and Pacific trade systems, this project has found that connections between these economic circuits, which became increasingly interdependent, intensified across the isthmus. In particular, the trade in slaves of American, African and, to a much lesser extent, Asian, origins, reveals a rise in trans-imperial (and not exclusively or even mainly Pacific) commerce after 1641. Such commerce made Panama more attractive as well as more accessible to invaders, including those who sacked the city in 1671, provoking its subsequent relocation.
