The Valley de Naco: Ethnohistory and Archaeology in Northwestern Honduras

Abstract

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A View from the South

“…At the time of the Spanish Conquest, it was occupied by peoples speaking Chort¡ Maya, Nahuat, Care, Lenca, and Jicaque (Feldman 1987). Henderson (1977) has suggested that the Sula plain formed a linguistic frontier between Chol and Jicaque speakers at this time. A wide variety of settlement and artifactual data indicate that it was not integrated into a single unit or polity, and several culturally and linguistically distinct groups may have lived side-by-side during the Late Postclassic and Contact periods (Henderson 1978).…”

“…Ethnohistoric documents describe coastwise trade routes from southern Campeche around the Yucatan Peninsula to the Gulf of Honduras and along the Caribbean coast of Central America. Cort‚s obtained information from the merchants of Xicalango, on the Laguna de T‚rminos, and Acal n, on the R¡o Candelaria, about major coastal settlements along most of the Caribbean coast of Central America and a map showing the route from the Laguna de T‚rminos to Nito and Naco in northwestern Honduras and centers in coastal Nicaragua and Panama (Henderson 1977).…”

“…Conclusions Models which have been applied to more highly centralized societies may be misleading when used to describe what is happening in lower Central America, where strongly hierarchical organization and clearly defined sociopolitical relationships are not as well defined. For example, Henderson (1977) is cautious of the identification in northwestern Honduras of "ports of trade" (cf. Polanyi et al 1957).…”

3 In the Beginning: The Experience of Residential Burial in Prehispanic Honduras

“…Our interest has been in understanding this social formation, to provide an alternative to more common models of societies in which pronounced social hierarchy developed in the presence of sufficient resources and time. The lower Ulúa Valley had an abundance of well‐drained, fertile soils (Pope 1987); was historically a center of the production of cacao (Bergmann 1969; Henderson 1979), one of the major cash crops in prehispanic times; exported not only cacao but also other valuables to Maya cities in Yucatan in the sixteenth century (Henderson 1979); and in earlier prehispanic times produced a rich material culture, some of it exported, that required the support of a wide array of artisans (Lopiparo 2006; Luke and Tykot 2007).…”

Material Symbolics in Pre-Columbian Households: The Painted Pottery of Naco, Honduras

“…The inhabitants of the region probably included speakers of several languages: Maya (the Chol and possibly Chorti variants), Jicaque (possibly a member of the Hokan family, a tongue primarily associated with the Honduran north coast east of the Ulua), and Lenca (a language or group of languages of controversial affinity, distributed throughout western Honduras from south of Naco to the Pacific coast) (Campbell 1976;Chapman 1958;Scholes and Roys 1948:17). There is no direct evidence for the native language(s) spoken in Naco itself, although the most likely candidates would seem to be Lenca and Maya (Chapman 1978b;Henderson 1979;J.E.S. Thompson 1970:86, 91-92, 130).…”