Ladd] PARITA AND SANTA MARIA ARCHEOLOGY, PANAIVIA 37 



Find 9. No polychrome vessels. A large Red-buff collarless jar or 

 urn and a Smoked ware plate with horizontally flattened 

 lip. 

 Comment. — These five finds, on the basis of the monochrome wares, 

 all resemble each other in the presence of either a large Red-buff 

 collarless jar or Smoked ware plates or both. The polychrome associ- 

 ations are questionable either because they are in terms of sherds with 

 weathered breaks which may have belonged in the surrounding fill 

 rather than in the find unit proper, or because the field description 

 does not jibe with the material present for study, e.g., the Macaracas 

 pedestal plate (Find 8-1) is not mentioned in the field notes although 

 the other vessels of the unit are. All were found above the lowest 

 levels of the trench, that is at 2.4 meters or above, and all were caches, 

 not graves. 



Find 346. Polychrome: Two Macaracas type (Pica-pica variety) 

 vessels. Monochrome: Large Red-buff collarless jar (frag- 

 ments only). Red-buff class "a" collared jars. Red-buff 

 ring-based plate. Miniature ring-based gray-brown plate. 

 Find is a grave unit. 

 Find 364. Polychrome: Macaracas type (Pica-pica variety). Mono- 

 chrome: Red-buff ring-based plate and a class "a" collarless 

 jar. Find is a cache only. 

 Find 384. Polychrome: Three Macaracas type (Pica-pica variety) 



vessels. Cache only. 

 The only other complete vessels found in the trench were a Red-buff 

 collared jar (class "a") and a small Red-buff collarless jar. 



With the exception of Find 1, all the finds of this mound containing 

 polychrome vessels are characterized by the Macaracas type. The 

 association in Find 1 of an El Hatillo type vessel with the class "b" 

 collared jar, is supported by a similar but more reliable association in 

 Find 30. Without attempting to extract too much from insufficient 

 evidence, one might reasonably postulate that the mound was built 

 up in at least two main stages. The earlier stage covered the deepest 

 Macaracas burials. The later one, in which were deposited the caches 

 represented by Finds 1, 5, 6, 8, and 9, was characterized by higher 

 proportions of El Hatillo and Parita sherds. This leaves unexplained 

 the high proportion (43 percent of the total Azuero Polychrome for 

 that level) of Parita type sherds in the lowest level. It could be 

 argued that the Macaracas graves in levels bearing Parita sherds 

 indicate a later date for the former. This thesis, however, is otherwise 

 unsupported by the stratigraphy at He-4 and Sitio Conte, where 

 Macaracas is associated with Late Code in graves and caches but 

 Parita varieties are missing. 



693-817—64 4 



