Intermediate Area

2: South America (Prentice Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ).

It comprises the geographical region between Mesoamerica to the north and the Central Andes to the south, including portions of Honduras and Nicaragua and most of the territory of the republics of Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia.

Because it was not home to ancient state societies but was predominated by early chiefdoms at the time of the Spanish conquest, it was sometimes regarded as a kind of cultural backwater that contributed little to the emergence of Pre-Columbian civilization in the New World.

However, recent archaeological research has demonstrated that this part of the Americas had some of the earliest agriculture, pottery, and metallurgy in the hemisphere.

[1] Given new findings, it is likely to have played a critical role in the transmission of culture both to and between neighboring regions to the north and south.