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& Atlantic Watershed Zone
By far the largest and most disparate of Costa Rica's archaeological zones, the Central Highlands-Atlantic Watershed is a composite of four or perhaps five geographic subzones, grouped here because the stylistic similarities of their artifacts suggest that they shared more or less common cultural traditions.
The Central Highlands can also be divided into two subzones, the temperate valley where the modern capital of San Jose and most of the country's population are located, and the central Pacific drainage, composed of parallel ranks of rugged mountains and steep valleys which terminate in a limited strip of coastal plains. Although a part of the Pacific drainage and subject to its sharp seasonality, the Central Valley is closely related to the Atlantic Watershed throughout the known prehistoric cultural sequence. The central Pacific drainage appears to follow the same pattern, but this subzone is, archaeologically, one of the least known in Costa Rica; its limits on the Pacific coast fall roughly between the modern towns of Quepos and Puntarenas. Like the Central Valley, it has a basically Pacific climatic regime. Next »
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The largest and most characteristic part of this zone is made
up of small to medium-sized valleys, with clear, rushing rivers, and the
extensive, fertile lowland plains that make up the Atlantic Watershed of Costa
Rica north and west of modern Port Limon. Below that city, the plains are
abbreviated because the Talamanca range approaches the Caribbean. Here the
Precolumbian cultural pattern seems to resemble more closely that of the Bocas
del Toro region of Panama. The extreme northwest corner of the Atlantic
Watershed seems to tend to Greater Nicoya affiliations. Neither subzone has been
investigated systematically to date. Throughout most parts of the Atlantic
Watershed, rainfall is heavy, generally from two to five meters per year, with
no distinct dry season; less rain usually falls in March and April. 'The steeper
eastern face of the Cordillera Central causes the moisture-laden easterlies to
rise, cool, and release most of the resulting rain on the Caribbean side. The
original vegetation in the zone was tropical rain forest. and it still remains
in a few parts, although most of it has been cut down to make pasture lands and
banana plantations, and to stock the strong market for tropical hardwoods. In
spite of extreme weathering, soils are, for the most part, rich, dark, and of
good drainage, although typical rain-forest laterites are sporadically present.
Most rivers run with sparklingly clean white water in the- upper reaches, where
they are filled with rounded volcanic cobbles, and are partially navigable in
the more sedate meandering stages near the Caribbean. Cyclical flooding is the
rule, not the exception.
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