Last December 2024 in the Southern Caribbean of Costa Rica, a sui generis project under the tittle “Our Ancestral Roots in Costa Rica” was born.
The project is being developed by a non-formal, inter-generational, inter-ethnic and inter-institutional group of activists, researchers, citizenry sciences, archaeomythologists and academics in the country and elsewhere, made up of indigenous Bribri leaders, academics from the cultural research centers of two universities in Costa Rica and independent researchers and activists.
They are:
- Two independent activists and researchers with extensive experience in epistemology, pedagogy, theology, the arts and linguistics.
- Four Bribri leaders in Talamanca.
- One Afro Brazilian theologian in Costa Rica.
One artist. - Four members of the Center for Research in Culture and Development (CICDE) of the Distance State University, (UNED).
- Two members of the Research Center on Cultural Diversity and Regional Studies (CIDICER) of the Western Campus of the University of Costa Rica West
- The director of The Institute of Archaeomythology (IAM) of California, USA.
- The Director and an activist of The Institute of Community Sciences of the Seas (INMAR Caribe) in Cahuita
The project was born with the objective of contributing to position an almost invisible but very important issue in the agenda of culture in Costa Rica:
our deepest common ancestry as women today.
Photos of most founders’ meeting in CASA Marina of INMAR Caribe in Talamanca, Costa Rica.
About the Focus of the Project
It is about a topic that has not yet been studied enough, recognized enough or assumed with the depth it deserves.
It is about our indigenous, Afro-descendant and mixed heritage ancestral mythology, which is manifested, among other cultural expressions, in the large number of female figures preserved in the Jade Museum of Costa Rica, in the collection of the feminist historian Anna Arroba (1947-2018) and in other places in Costa Rica and elsewhere.
These figures speak to us in the language of the arts of our original “prehistoric” cultures, expressing the non-recognized centrality of women in precolonial social organization of human life in its interactive regenerative symbiosis with the rest of life.
Photo at Museo de Jade in San José, Costa Rica.
About the Context of the Project
Despite the impact caused by colonialism on the lives of our original native peoples, indigenous women have remained resilient in the face of policies that have sought to erase them from their place of respect in their holistic regeneration of the network of life in their communities and the country.
Other women in the country, Afro, mestizo, crossed native and Afro, Caucasian, have also kept their ancestral ancestry alive, especially when they have struggled to revitalize their force of life powers – almost decimated by the same policies; when they have used it in order to grow from within (autopoyesis) in their capacities to regenerate the web of life in relation to the all other forces of nature.
We have experiences in the application of a feminist epistemology, of shared knowledge in what we call citizen science, and also, with the recognition of the feminine sacredness in the mythologies of our native peoples, associated with the regenerative spirit of life on the planet.
The national and international context demand it and make it urgent. We live in one of the most disconnected moments in the history of humanity; most disconnected from its natural environment and from its own human nature as a gregarious maternal species that denies the place of women in the integral regeneration of life. Today human life is individualized and in an exaggerated way, it has converted the common goods and processes of nature into merchandise. This is expressed in all forms of hegemonism, violence, extractivism, colonialism and sexist and gender discrimination, among others.
What the Project Seeks
This group seeks to contribute to revitalize the ancestrality in our cultures by re-placing it in their deserved and urgent locus in current history and culture, despite having been subject to invisibility, devaluation and relegation in recent history.
We aim to place that hidden culture and its archaeomythological expressions in Costa Rica and others in Abya Yala, back into the “dance of cultural life”
We will do it from their dorso pa which in Bribri means community of clans, which in Yoruba is ile or idilei, in Spanish “community of homes” to which we all belong.
First Stage of the Project
The aim of the first stage is to prepare, design and publish the book “The Goddesses of Anna Arroba”, which will present 36 photographs of her collection of figures, accompanied by information that will be collected interactively by people who can “adopt” one of the figures to document and research it for the book. 
This first initiative of the project will be announced in detail soon so that those who wish to participate can do so.
In order to do the Introduction to the book, we have created a core group currently undertaking five studies about the feminist epistemology and shared knowledge in the following:
- The epistemology in the oral and artistic language of our indigenous peoples: how their learned and how they shared that knowledge in the part and what is present today
- The epistemology in the citizen science that the Afro descendant youth have used in their project about the search for the identity of slave ships in the Caribbean and other Afro descendant epistemologies associated with the spiritual culture they brought to the Americas.
- The epistemology of Anna Arroba (1947-2018) in her courses and activism regarding the sacred feminine in the history of women’s bodies.
- The epistemology in Marija Gimbutas’ (1921-1994) archaeomythology was researched and presented by Joan Marler in her own research’s epistemology about Old Europe.
- The epistemology used by a feminist plastic arts artist in her documentation and expression of the goddesses in Costa Rica.
