Before Guanacaste

Before Guanacaste

     Fred Lange was twenty years old in 1965 when he first visited Guanacaste; he did that on a twelve-hour bus ride from San Jose’ to Nicoya. As he recalls the trip, the highway from Liberia was just being built and there were no hotels at all in Playa Tamarindo or on the Bay of Culebra. Mr. Lange, author of “Before Guanacaste”, has worked in most of the countries in Central America, studying, among other things, the social aspects of the pre-Colombian indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, including Canada, his home state of Wisconsin, New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico. He holds a doctorate in Archaeology and taught at the University of Colorado for more than fifteen years. He has studied the ruins and artifacts in Panama Viejo and Managrillo in Panama, Leon Viejo, Los Placerers, Acahualinca and many other important sites in Nicaragua, as well as “all the important sites in Costa Rica,” as he explained to me recently.

     Through the new book, Lange explores the pre-Colombian area of northwest Costa Rica, dating back more than five thousand years. “There are a few sites that date back even farther than that,” he observed, “we have evidence that people went through Costa Rica enroute to South America some fifteen thousand years ago,” he explained.

     Fred is also the author of “Paths to Central American Prehistory”, “Cultura Naturaleza Sin Fronteras” (Natural History without Borders), “Archaeology of Pacific Nicaragua” and “Archaeology of Lower Central America”. In addition, from 1975 to 1979, he worked on the restoration of both the National Museum of Costa Rica and the National Museum of Nicaragua, following its destruction resulting from the 1972 earthquake. To add to his resume, Fred was also a consultant in 1997, working on the installation of the archaeological halls at the National Museum of Nicaragua at both sites, in Granada and Managua. You could say he is a man of diverse interests in his passion.

     In “Before Guanacaste”, Mr. Lange explains in lay, easy to understand terms to the reader, the development of civilization in that area starting, literally, with man’s arrival as a hunter and gatherer, and following his development to having communities, cultivating, and protecting their surroundings. As Lange points out, there were other, more dominant civilizations, i.e., Mayas to the north and Incas to the south, developing around Guanacaste, but that “these bigger and more powerful civilizations never controlled Guanacaste of Costa Rica and the main evidence of their presence or contacts here is in the occasional artifact or asymbolism present on artifacts made in Guanacaste.” Little is known about Costa Rica’s early civilization because, as Lange concedes, “throughout the world, non-architectural cultures play second fiddle to cultures that built architectural remains”. With his new book, Fred allows the reader to view a common village of indigenous Costa Rican people, to watch them as they pass through the toils of a normal day: hunting and fishing, gathering food and constructing their habitats, practicing their religious observations and their social patterns. It is remarkable to learn just how peaceful these indigenous people were. It is also interesting to watch the development of the societies as they hone their skills, literally through millennia. Fred Lange has turned out a great hands-on view of the dawn of man in this area.
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