When conquistador Gil Gonzalez Dávila entered Nicoya in 1523, it was the largest cacicazgo (chiefdom) on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica.

The treasurer on Dávila's expedition, Andrés de Cereceda, reported a population of 6,063 inhabitants under Nicoya's leadership, almost five and a half times larger than the next largest settlement visited by the Spanish along the Pacific coast in the early 1520s.

[9] Archaeological excavations were conducted in and around the city of Nicoya in the early 1990s to test these theories and to better understand how the indigenous community was transformed into a colonial town.

This site appears to be larger than the rest; it exhibits low earthen mounds and is particularly prized by local looters for its high-quality polychrome pottery and gold artifacts.

Neither site is near the size necessary to hold that number of people if we accept even as an approximate Newson's (1987:87) estimates of 0.045 to 0.06 persons/hectare for Pacific Nicaragua at Spanish contact, and as little as 0.02 persons/hectare for Nicoya.

An alternative interpretation of Cereceda's figures would understand them as representing the inhabitants of several settlements politically affiliated with Nicoya but not the members of one massive community.

Among other tools of colonial administration, the Spanish crown created a policy called congregación, or the forced resettlement of native peoples into nucleated settlements to more closely watch and control their charges.

The evidence leads one to further hypothesize that the present-day Nicoya is the product of Spanish colonial congregación, formed by the forced amalgamation of people from the pre-Hispanic settlements dispersed throughout the region.

[13] During the first 50 years of Conquest, Nicoya was of great local importance as a transshipment point between the more active Spanish colonies in Nicaragua and Panama; a staging area and breadbasket for the initial entradas, forays into the interior, by Juan Vázquez de Coronado; and a rich encomienda (source of tribute) for the governor of Nicaragua, Pedrarias Dávila and his family.

Regardless of justification, the historical record speaks clearly that native Nicoyans were incorporated into the Spanish colonial empire and simply became identified by the racial category of Indios (Indians).

A colonial policy established Pueblos de Indios (Indian towns) in which Spaniards (excepting crown and ecclesiastical authorities) were prohibited from living.

As discussed above, there is indirect evidence that the native Nicoyans were forced to resettle from their original hamlets and villages to a single, nucleated town that is the Nicoya of today.

[15] It was not uncommon for the Spanish authorities to order such resettlement to maintain control over indigenous peoples as they suffered a precipitous decline in numbers during the 16th and early 17th centuries.

As populations thinned out, the Spanish would simply order the survivors to move to a single community to maintain a political, economic and ecclesiastical eye on them.

The Indians were obligated to make tribute payments and were given limited powers of self-government and had (in theory) access to a public defender's office (Defensor de Indios) for their corporate legal defense.

Valuable goods were quickly identified and exported to Spain or other colonies: at first the precious metals, followed by traffic in human beings, and later by a variety of agricultural commodities.

What had evolved by the mid-18th century in Spanish-dominated portions of lower Central America was, in essence, a system of apartheid, in which islands of isolated indigenous communities were surrounded by non-indigenous peoples of heterogeneous background.

Spanish, Mulatos and Ladinos settled on the cattle ranches surrounding Nicoya and, with direct access to the principal factor of production (land), were easily able to dominate the local economy.

However, one colonial document from 1765 may be highly indicative of the poor state of relations between the two ethnic groups and illustrative of the stark difference in the degree of estrangement between the Indians of Nicoya and surrounding Ladino community.

The arguments supporting their request were phrased in the language of ethnic group solidarity: The Ladinos sought the improvements that came from leaving their dispersed ranches and living in a town of their own and away from the Indians in Nicoya.

The Indian community of Nicoya persisted weakly as a shadow of its former self, maintained by a tradition of reciprocal ties of rights and obligations to patriarchal Crown authority.

For example, tribute in Nicoya was traditionally paid by one product that could be produced nowhere else in the region: cotton thread dyed purple with the secretion of a rare mollusk found on the Pacific Coast of the genus Murex.