The Forgotten Coast: Pre-Hispanic Settlement Patterns and Networks in Northeast Honduras

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Markus Reindel
• Subject Area: Prehistory and World Archaeology
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 541016457

Northeast Honduras represents one of Central America’s most intriguing yet little-understood cultural intersections. It lies at the confluence of three major pre-Hispanic cultural regions. With Mesoamerica to the west, Southern Central America to the south, and the Caribbean to the north, the area has long been considered peripheral and merely subject to the influence of its neighbors, which has resulted in a general lack of archaeological attention. However, our research has begun to reveal a more complex past in which the region’s inhabitants developed their own unique culture alongside and intertwined with those of their neighbors, creating complex economic and cultural networks that have not been recognized in previous investigations. The proposed project aims to investigate northeast Honduras through the lens of settlement archaeology, using state-of-the-art methods of prospection, material analysis and network analysis. It will generate new data about the region via excavation and prospection to gain insights into the pre-Hispanic inhabitant’s settlement patterns and the extent of their integration into the greater social and economic networks of the major cultural regions surrounding them. This work will thus explore northeast Honduras as one of the key regions for understanding cultural developments in Central America. They will build on the results of our preceding archaeological project that carried out excavations at three northeast Honduran sites and undertook surveys throughout the greater region. We were able to demonstrate the inhabitant’s involvement in far-reaching exchange networks with Mesoamerica and clarify aspects regarding settlement patterns and cultural practices that took place during the later periods (AD 1000 - 1525). This project will expand on these observations with an emphasis on the essentially-unknown early periods (1500 BC - AD 300), as our previous project identified the first known settlement in northeast Honduras that dates to this epoch. Excavations are to be carried out at the newly identified early-period site of Betulia with the goal of identifying settlement characteristics and network interaction with neighboring regions. Recent finds, such as obsidian originating in northern Mexico and Usulután-style ceramics, clearly indicate Betulia’s active participation in an extensive exchange network. The unearthing of additional material culture, especially ceramic, obsidian, and jade objects, will serve as the foundation for better defining the nature of these economic and cultural networks. Additional planned, systematic surveys throughout the northeast Honduras region will utilize terrestrial surveys, airborne LiDAR reconnaissance and geomagnetic prospection, to aid in the identification and characterization of archaeological sites and features, providing us valuable information about the region’s settlement patterns.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants