El Caño Archaeological Park

[1] These burial sites have helped researchers gain a better understanding of the dynamic system of the hierarchical chiefdom-based societies created by the people who lived in this region of Central America before contact with Europeans.

Verril was attracted to the area after finding several unusually shaped rocks (which would turn out to be ancient monoliths) sticking out of the ground while he was walking along the banks of the Rio Grande River (in Panama).

Even though archaeologists would be finding extraordinary artifacts made of gold and other precious materials just a few miles away in Sitio Conte throughout the 1930s and 1940s, there was no formal investigation ever launched at El Caño until the 1970s.

[2] The first formal investigation of a claimed burial site located at El Caño was conducted by a group of American archaeologists who were researching the written accounts from early Spanish Conquistadors.

According to many of the Spanish accounts, while travelling through this region they made contact with a group of people who lived in a society ruled by a small number of elites and created magnificent forms of gold work.

In the early 2000s an archaeologist named Julia Mayo who had previously been working at the neighboring site of Sitio Conte decided to launch a formal re-investigation of El Caño.

Mayo believed that the people who lived at El Caño may have been a branch of the Sitio Conte Culture that Harvard archaeologist Samuel Kirkland Lothrop theorized in a report written in 1937.

[4] After two years the information gathered through the survey determined that there was a clear circular outline of disturbance in the landscape that looked to contain the burials of Pre-Columbian people.

Archaeologists who have worked on the site believe that even though there have been many great discoveries, scientists have hardly scratched the surface of what El Caño can offer to the scientific world.

In recent years tourism has been rising in El Caño and today the local population have worked with Archaeologist to create a small archaeological park that people can visit.