Lake Alhajuela
- Folder Type:
- Archaeology Site
- Primary Title:
- Lake Alhajuela
- Alternate Title:
- Known as Lake Madden and often misspelt Lago Alajuela
- Summary Description:
- Lake Alhajuela is a human impoundment formed by the damming of the Chagres River between 1931 and 1934 in order to increase water flow for the Panama Canal. It is named Lago Alhajuela on early maps but is often misspelt ‘Lago Alajuela’ in local sources, and archaeological articles. (‘Alhaja’ means ‘jewel’, hence, ‘alhajuela’, small jewel). Its Canal Zone name was ‘Lake Madden’, by which most archaeologists know the find localities. During the Panama dry season, the levels of the lake drop drastically, exposing areas of clay, which have been washed by waves and rain ever since the lake’s creation in the 1930s. This phenomenon has exposed many archaeological sites, both Colonial and Pre-Columbian. Lake Alhajuela, under its name of Lake Madden, came to the attention of the archaeological world after the Second World War when vocational groups began to visit the eroded lake shores regularly to look for artifacts. This activity continues to this day with little official control. Among the Pre-Columbian finds made in the 1950s belonged to the Clovis tradition, for a long time assumed to be the first human presence in the Isthmian area. Vocational archaeologists picked up a complete waisted Clovis fluted point, and two snapped bases of “fish-tail” points, which were already known from South America. These were announced in local journals and the proceedings of international congresses. This exposure alerted archaeologist Junius B. Bird, who was on the staff of the American Museum of Natural History. Bird was famed for his discovery of Paleoindians in caves in Chilean Patagonia before the second World War, where, for the first time outside the United States, he associated the remains of extinct mega-mammals (mostly horses and giant ground sloths) in the same strata as the weapons used to kill and prepare them, including fluted projectile points called “fish-tail” by Bird, and thereafter. Finds of fish-tail and slightly older Clovis fluted points at Lake Alhajuela attracted Bird to Panama. He was nearing retirement and thought that recovering stratified evidence for late Pleistocene “Paleoindian” peoples in the Central American tropics would be an appropriate swansong to his long and distinguished career, which had taken him also to coastal Chile and Peru and the Arctic. Sadly, finding stratified early human sites in the Neotropics was much more difficult than Bird expected. He set up camp in the dry season of 1972 and dug quite large excavations under two calcareous rock-shelters. Tropical geomorphology confused him. Deflation prevailed over accretion. Bird dug under the shallow and superficial Pre-Columbian layers of these shelters into clay and went down and down. But he found nothing Preceramic or Paleoindian. In the afternoons and at weekends, however, members of the Isthmian Archaeology Association--under the aegis of Florida State University’s Canal Zone Branch--would visit Bird’s camp, and go out with him by dugout and outboard to the islands in the lake in search of Paleoindian materials. Some luck was had with complete, re-sharpened and damaged fluted points, and other Paleoindian tools, such as “thumbnail” scrapers. Bird was an excellent communicator, and he thoroughly enjoyed explaining stone tool technology to visitors and local people, using the very large samples of tools and debris at some localities for his demonstrations including Isla Carranza on then edge of the lake where a large muli-component archaeological site existed. Bird himself found a fish-tailed point in 1973 on a dry season island (Isla Marcelito). This was complete except for the ears, which had broken off while the spear was spinning and hit a hard object. Bird’s work encouraged a Canal Zone resident, Mr. William Bennett, to hand over to the Museo Nacional a complete and undamaged fish-tail point, which Benett had picked up at a locality called San Juan, north of the River Chagres, In the 1980s and 1990s, other archaeologists with a specialized interest in the Paleoindian period continued to search for early human sites around Lake Alhajuela. One of these was Anthony J. Ranere from Temple University who located a large workshop for fashioning fish-tail points on Isla Butler, where a fish-tail fluted base was picked up in 1954 by Dan Sander, a local businessman, and a fish-tail blade with snapped fluted base by Elmer Díaz, one of Junius Bird’s employees. Michael Faught from Florida State University continued searching for Paleoindian sites in the 1990s. In addition to these important lithic localities, water action exposed many Pre-Columbian settlements belonging to later ages when Isthmian natives used pottery. Two vocational groups, the Panama Archaeology Society (1948-1969) and the Archaeology Society, located several sites with pottery around the lake, including caves, which contained wooden artifacts (very rarely recorded in Panama), and the important mortuary precinct of La Tranquilla. This site just north of the River Chagres was studied by Russell Mitchell. Its graves cross-dated by pottery style to 600-750 CE pre-date the more elaborate mortuary precincts of Sitio Conte and El Caño in the Pacific lowlands of Coclé. The La Tranquilla graves contained fine shell artifacts very similar to the ones found at the Playa Venado site near the eastern exit of the Panama Canal, which was subjected to excavations by professionals and looters in the 1950s.
| PID | Type | Title | Metadata | URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| si_1259780 | Alhajuela, Polish stone pendants |
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| si_1259784 | Alhajuela, camp |
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| si_1259785 | Alhajuela, students |
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| si_1259786 | Alhajuela, damp sifter |
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| si_1259788 | Alhajuela, wheelbarrow trench |
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| si_1259789 | Alhajuela, Cave 2 beginnings |
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| si_1259790 | Alhajuela, Cave 2 |
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| si_1259792 | Alhajuela, Cave 1 |
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| si_2754876 | Ending Cave 2 |
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| si_2754877 | Alhajuela lake |
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