Qualla: Las Mercedes Archaeological Site

Las Mercedes Archaeological Site: Introduction

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1871, Minor C. Keith was building a railroad from Costa Rica's Central Valley to Puerto Limon on the Caribbean coast when his crews cut straight through something ancient. A gold artifact surfaced from the earth, and Keith - the man who would go on to co-found the United Fruit Company - began digging in earnest, though not with an archaeologist's care. He eventually amassed 16,608 artifacts from across Costa Rica, many from this single site. Today those objects are scattered across the Brooklyn Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Museum of Ethnography in Sweden. The place that yielded them, Las Mercedes, turned out to be far more significant than a treasure trove. It was a political capital, occupied continuously for three thousand years.

Las Mercedes Archaeological Site: A City Between Rivers

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Las Mercedes sits at just 90 meters above sea level on the Caribbean slope, between the foothills of Turrialba Volcano and the alluvial plain. Rivers define its geography: the Dos Novillos flows 700 meters to the southeast, the Parismina 2.5 kilometers to the northeast, and small...

Las Mercedes Archaeological Site: Roads Built to Impress

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two stone-paved causeways extend from the heart of Las Mercedes-1 in opposite directions, each named for the modern town it points toward. The Iroquois Causeway has been traced for 660 meters before disappearing at the edge of the EARTH University reserve that now protects part o...

Las Mercedes Archaeological Site: The Hartman Platform and Its Warriors

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The central platform, now called the Hartman Platform after the Swedish archaeologist who first excavated it in 1896, stands six meters tall with a diameter of thirty meters. Carl Vilhelm Hartman, a botanist turned anthropologist, removed two 1.85-meter stone warrior figures from...

Las Mercedes Archaeological Site: Three Thousand Years of Continuity

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Carbon dating and stratigraphic analysis place the earliest occupation of Las Mercedes at approximately 1500 BC, with monumental construction beginning around AD 1000. That means people lived here for twenty-five centuries before they started building the platforms and causeways ...

Las Mercedes Archaeological Site: What the Graves Held

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The funerary areas tell stories that the platforms cannot. Alanson Skinner, who excavated during the winter of 1916-1917, found graves containing not just ceramics but incense burners, stone disks, meteoric iron gravers, flint knives, greenstone earspools, jade ornaments, a coppe...