Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2025
The ruins of Panamá Viejo’s Cathedral, with a tower symbolizing the national past, provide a popular site for weddings and other events during the “dry season” from January through April. In 2017, however, such celebrations took place elsewhere. With support from the European Research Council (ERC CoG 648535) and the Patronato Panamá Viejo, local workers, university students, archaeologists, and bioanthropologists undertook research-driven excavations in the Cathedral nave. The results, meticulously recovered and analyzed, proved even more surprising than the team’s bottom-up approach to the first European settlement on America’s Pacific Ocean (see Map I.1 and Figure I.1).
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