Kioskos Ambientales

  • A Seminar will be held that will consist of panels, presentations, debates, dialogues, cultural activities and field visits in Cahuita

Between June 3 to 6, 2024, a Seminar entitled “Multicultural Dialogue and Inherited Knowledge Honoring Our Cultural Roots, Archaeomythology and Citizen Science” will be held in Cahuita, Talamanca, Limón.

Organized by Ambassadors of the Sea Diving Center, the Institute of Citizen Sciences of the Sea (INMAR CARIBE), Festival del Mar, the University of Costa Rica Caribbean Campus and the international Institute of Archaeomythology.

What is archaeomythology? It is a discipline that seeks to expand the interpretative limits of archeology and incorporate the study of beliefs, rituals, symbolic images and cultural objects created in antiquity, not only in their utilitarian and economic contexts, but as expressions of social and mythological functions that reflect peoples’ ancestral systems of meaning.

The discipline of archaeomythology was created by the North American Lithuanian archaeologist Dr. Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994) and is continued by the Institute of Archaeomythology based in California, USA, under the direction of Dr. Joan Marler.

The event fosters a dialogue about the traditional ways of life of the people in Talamanca and in other national and international cultural regions relevant to the interdisciplinary approach of archaeomythology.

In Talamanca this holistic process in the construction of knowledge is called “citizen science.” Ambassadors of the Sea will present a praxis of this knowledge with which the young Afro and Afro mestizos Bribri have developed ancestral knowledge with the scientific method.

Together with their communities, they have developed a community cultural management research/action process that has been able to find and verify a hidden history at the bottom of the sea.

This process makes visible a chapter in the history of slavery and, in doing so, reconnects the broken fabrics of our national and personal identities (Kioscosambientales UCR, 6-11-23).

This recovered history connects with the ancestral roots, myths and current struggles of the Afro-descendant population, and with the Bribri, Cabécar and Ngäbe, which affirms their identities and their history of shared resistance to colonialism that tried to separate them from their own cultural heritage.

Seminar activities. Will consist of panels, presentations, dialogues, debates and field visits demonstrating the ancestral production of cocoa and land visits to archaeological sites in the Cahuita National Park.

Other cultural activities will present approaches and conceptualizations related to archaeomythology in terms of exploring artistic sources of knowledge. Two panels have been organized on ancestral knowledge of our native peoples of Talamanca and other latitudes. Experiences, visions and mythology of Bribri, Cabécar, Ngäbe and mestizo women will be presented. Another panel of Afro and mestizo women will present their experiences, founding stories and visions.

A third panel will feature presentations by young divers from men and women  Embajadores/as del Mar Community Diving Center (CCBEM), the director of the National Museum of Costa Rica, a resident communicator and expeditionary of National Geographic, a philosopher from the National University of Heredia in Costa Rica, the director and a board member of the Institute of Archaeomythology and the representative of the Cultural Program of the Central American Office of UNESCO.

Two field visits will be offered, one of ancestral Afro descendant cocoa production in Playa Grande de Cahuita and another on the beach near archaeological sites looking from Punta Cahuita beach, where a Cocoa Ceremony led by Bribri, Cabécar and Ngäbe and a Memorial to the victims of Tragic Transatlantic of Enslaved People by Afro descendant women in the Seminar.

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