Abstract
Archaeologists have been experimenting with Christer Westerdahl’s concept of ‘maritime cultural landscape’ since he first published the definitions in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology in 1992. The idea has evolved considerably since then, and has seen dozens of substantive and thoughtful applications. The Maritime Landscape of the Isthmus of Panamá is perhaps one of the most ambitious to date. This is not just because of the indisputable historical significance of that region, but because of the way this volume challenges the very juxtaposition of water and land that is at the heart of Westerdahl’s original concept. This book is written by an international team of archaeologists whose expertise spans the entire scope of human history in the Isthmus. Together, authors Delgado, Mendizábal, Hanselmann and Rissolo craft a richly detailed narrative that weaves together land and sea, prehistory and history, present and past, indigenous and settler communities, and environmental and cultural frameworks for understanding this complex, constantly changing place. This evocative story of place anchors a sweeping historical narrative of the Isthmus that begins with the earliest human settlement of the region at least 12,000 years ago, and ends with the return of the canal to Panamanian national sovereignty in the early twenty-first century, and the plans to transform its landscape yet again to meet the challenges of the future.
Maritime cultural landscapes are defined by a kind of pervasive liminality, an ‘in-between-ness’ that goes beyond the obvious water/land duality to embrace many other variables and perspectives. As such, the Isthmus of Panamá could not possibly provide a better case study. Located between two oceans and two continents, it has also seen millennia of continuous transformation, both geographically and culturally. The nominal boundaries between water and land, and between and among the peoples living in the region, have shifted constantly, and yet, there are threads of continuity that run through the entire course of the region’s history. The book’s authors leverage this dynamic liminality to re-examine three fundamental aspects of maritime cultural landscapes.
The first explores the inherently recursive element in all cultural landscape approaches: the extent to which any given environment and the people living in it shape and reshape each other over time. ‘The maritime cultural landscape of Panamá has shaped the Central American isthmus as much as it has been shaped by it’ is the caption underneath the first map in the volume (p. xix). This assertion forms the basis for the entire book, and most importantly, imbeds the excavation of a transisthmian canal one hundred years ago in a much broader and more contextualized evaluation of other transformations of both people and place. The canal no longer defines the isthmus, but rather becomes part of a continuously evolving landscape whose transformations, the authors make quite clear, are by no means over yet.
The second analytical trope plays on the constantly changing relationship between water and land in this uniquely transformed region of the world. Digging a canal across the land brought the waters of two oceans together, but this volume puts that planetary event in a much more nuanced context. Places built and used by local residents have been repeatedly flooded or filled, submerged and then rebuilt, over centuries. Some of this is the result of geology and climate, while some is either the intentional or unintentional result of human activity. But if all cultural landscapes are palimpsests of previous interactions between people and the environments in which they live, then Panamá teaches us that in maritime cultural landscapes those superimposed layers also include the ebb and flow of what is land, and what is water.
The third conceptual exploration these authors make is perhaps their most audacious, and the most insightful one for other researchers. They use the fact of the Isthmus as a powerful, irreplaceable nexus in a global network of shipping, trade and transportation to expand the very concept of maritime landscape itself to its greatest possible extent. Delineated by a painstakingly documented network of shipwrecks, shipping routes, ports, harbours, and both near and distant embarkations, destinations, waypoints, place names, and commemorative monuments, they map out what is ultimately a global reach for the maritime cultural landscape of a place called Panamá. In doing so, they suggest that all maritime landscapes are defined ultimately not by their boundaries, but by their trajectories.
This approach is radical, because it suggests that when we set about defining a ‘place’, we should do so in terms of its historical connections to other places, rather than drawing a fixed map of its physical boundaries. So, the steamer San Francisco that embarked from New York on the nineteenth-century ‘Panama Route’, but wrecked off the coast of the Carolinas, is part of this Panamanian landscape. But so is Portobello Road in today’s London, named after a 1739 British destruction of the Spanish colonial trading port at the mouth of the Chagres River. As are the remnant structures and features of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco, 1915) and the Panama California Exposition (San Diego, 1915–1917), that were both designed to lay claim to the future benefits of the recently completed Panama Canal.
By extending their historical treatment back to the initial arrival of human settlers in the region, continuing through the present and then projecting it forward into the immediate future with the re-engineering of the Canal to accommodate the larger ships of the early twenty-first century, Delgado and his colleagues invite the reader into this evocative conversation about the meanings of these maritime landscapes. As a result, reading the book brings entirely new questions to mind. If nineteenth- and twentieth-century international shipping made Panama’s maritime cultural landscape a ‘global’ one, then surely so did its role in the initial expansion of human beings into the Western hemisphere and the very first settlements of North and South America, ten thousand years earlier? The fact that many of those sites are now submerged under the rising seas that marked the beginning of the Holocene is only the first of many disappearances of sites beneath the waters in this volume. How do we compare the tracks of the nineteenth century railroad across the isthmus, now submerged beneath the waters of Lake Gatun, with the submerged wrecks of ships sunk in and around Panamanian harbors, or simply on their way to and from the isthmus, as elements in a maritime cultural landscape? If silver was a maritime trade in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Panamá, then surely twenty-first-century Caribbean tourism, with its cruise ships and aggressively competitive ports of call, is equally a maritime trade in this part of the world today?
Indeed, one final consequence of the maritime cultural landscape approach is the way in which the archaeological sites themselves become yet another landscape element, not just in the past, but the present. Scientific exploration, tourism development, and private financial exploitation of these sites become part of the maritime cultural landscape of modern Panamá. The authors do not shy away from comment on the need for more research and site protection, the impacts of both urban development and tourism on the integrity of the sites, and the wholesale destruction caused by systemic looting of both shipwrecks and terrestrial sites. But at the same time, they remind us that this physical presence of the past is also a fundamental part of Panamá’s contemporary maritime cultural landscape.
Readers looking for an encyclopaedic historical treatment of Panamá will be disappointed. Some subjects, particularly political and economic ones not tied directly to the maritime life of the area, are only mentioned in passing, though with generous references for other sources. At the same time, the very effort of drawing together four different narrative voices and many more areas of expertise sometimes contributes to an overwhelming amount of particularistic detail about the topics that are discussed. This is most evident in some of the discussions of the relevant data sets covered: archaeological site details and artifactual analysis; technical specifics of ship construction; engineering aspects of the various canal constructions; or logistical aspects of successive waves of militarization of strategic sites and features. Individual readers may have to navigate across some passages that are familiar, but others that are much less so, depending on their own interests and areas of expertise.
Yet it is precisely this rich material documentation, across all scales from the minutiae of a discarded wine bottle to the global reach of a navigational route, that ultimately gives The Maritime Landscape of the Isthmus of Panamá its power and coherence. Again and again, we are brought back to the continuities across time, and as a result, to the enduring questions. The authors do not provide us with easy answers. It cannot be an accident that they end their volume, not with the hopefully progressive planned expansion of the Canal, but with the challenges facing the Guna. An indigenous people who have graciously taken in many others displaced by the brutalities of colonialism, the Guna themselves survived by relocating from the mainland to the surrounding islands of eastern Panamá. In the process, they became a much more maritime people, and created yet another transformative layer of the Panamanian maritime cultural landscape. And now that landscape is being transformed yet again, as climate change threatens to submerge the very islands to which the Guna retreated. Once again, the relationship between water and land will be redefined by the people of this inherently maritime cultural landscape.