Fed by high food costs, consumer prices in August rose 1.79 percent, adding to Costa Rica's steady inflationary rate that during the past year has surpassed 15 percent.
Groceries and nonalcoholic beverages led the upward charge, rising 2.42 percent in August and 26.6 percent since last September, according to National Statistics and Census Institute (INEC).
Transportation costs rose 3.19 percent in August, bringing their 12-month increase to just over 19 percent, while entertainment and cultural events rose 2 percent last month.
The 15.4 percent increase in consumer prices between September 2007 and August was the largest for that period in more than 10 years.
Between September 2006 and August 2007, consumer prices rose 8.56 percent, according to INEC. |
It's the third month of a 100-day saturation sweep of Costa Rica's Carribean Limón province, and authorities say the results have been “surprising.”
The operation, launched in July, is intended to “clean the streets” of crack addicts and drug dealers, Public Security Minister Janina del Vecchio said at the time.
According to a press release, police since then have seized 184 firearms, 184 crack rocks, 43 vehicles and 1.3 kilograms of cocaine as a result of the campaign. The Drug Control Police claims to have destroyed 300,000 marijuana shrubs in the canton of Talamanca. So far, 61 checkpoints and 26 river patrols were set up and 100 people were arrested for drug, firearms, domestic violence, assault on a police officer and immigration violations.
The sweep has focused mostly on the city of Limón. Other areas in Limón province, such as tourist hub Puerto Viejo, have seen little police action during the operation.
Eddie Ryan, the owner of the Costa Papito hotel in Playa and vice president of the Southern Caribbean's tourism chamber, said he's seen little law enforcement activity in the area during the “sweep.”
“We're totally abandoned here,” he said. |
The Costa Rican Chamber of Commerce is now accepting nominations for its 2008 awards, which are to be presented Nov. 6 in an event called Noche de Galardones 2008, or Awards Night 2008.
Businesses and individuals can nominate others or themselves for a series of categories either at the Web site www.nochedegalardones.com, the e-mail address palvarado@camara-comercio.com or by sending a fax to 2223-1157. Nominations are being accepted until Sept. 30.
The categories include business, education, young businessman or woman of the year, regional expansion, exporter, manager of the year, industry, innovation, tourism, corporate social responsibility, and other categories.
“It is a pleasure to begin this process of nominations and award all those businesses and people that make this country great through their efforts and dedication,” said Oscar Cabada, president of the Chamber of Commerce. |
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This new Tico Times column will provide insights and news on Costa Rica's fascinating ancient past. Archaeologist Michael J. Snarskis, Ph.D., has lived and worked in Costa Rica for more than 30 years. He founded and directed the first scientific archaeology program in the National Museum and trained the first generation of Costa Rican students there and as a professor at the University of Costa Rica. A graduate of Yale and Columbia universities, he has published 67 books and articles, including catalogues for acclaimed museum exhibitions in the United States and Europe.
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| Good Points: At left, a preform for a Clovis spear point; center, whole and fragmented bifacial finished Clovis points; at right, a fishtail fluted spear point, all from Finca Guardiria, near the Caribbean-slope town of Turrialba. |
Michael Snarskis | Tico Times |
Are you intrigued by old, enigmatic objects? Sometimes wonder about those unusual different-colored layers in road cuts? Found some pottery fragments in your garden that don't look like anything modern? You dig?
Well, whether you dig or not, this column will provide answers to a lot of these kinds of questions, elucidate Costa Rica's key role in the archaeology of the Americas, and highlight landmark discoveries in the country over the past 50 years. Your questions are welcome.
The First Costa Ricans
Given current archaeological evidence, the first people in Costa Rica were definitely present at least 10,000 to 11,000 years B.C. Two things are important here: 1) they left behind chipped stone artifacts – spear points, hide and wood scrapers, drills – that have been securely radiocarbon-dated (C-14) to those times in other parts of the Americas; and 2) they were already physiologically modern human beings (Homo sapiens), just like we are today.
There was no human evolution in the American continents prior to Homo sapiens; that biological evolution took place in Africa, Asia and Europe only. The consensus among modern scientific archaeologists is that the first small bands of hunters following the last ice-age big game (megafauna such as mastodons, mammoths and others) across the frozen Bering Strait from Asia found themselves in a hunter's paradise, where big meaty animals did not know or fear humans and thus made easy prey. Some other archaeologists believe that humans entered the Americas as early as 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. These early human hunters killed by trapping giant animals in swampy ground and killing them with spears.
About Spear Points: Clovis and Fishtail
A pervasive theme that I will be mentioning here and in most of my columns to come is the importance of Costa Rica as a dynamic, fluctuating frontier zone between two major spheres of pre-Columbian cultural influence: Mesoamerica (central Mexico through El Salvador) and northern South America, primarily Colombia. (For those who might be wondering, the Andean high civilizations such as the Inca and their predecessors had very little to do with Costa Rican indigenous cultures.)
Remarkably, this cultural frontier role is evident even in the first human artifacts found in Costa Rica, which, in 1975, I found in a recently plowed sugarcane field called Finca Guardiria, near the Caribbean-slope town of Turrialba.
With the first archaeology students I had hired at the National Museum, we were surface-collecting the chipped flint-like stone artifacts we observed, first staking out a two-by-two-meter grid for better spatial control of the uppermost terrace of the cane field. There were lots of interesting man-made flint chips and reworked tools, but imagine my surprise when the student archaeologists emptied their collected bags back in the National Museum: two Clovis (named after Clovis, New Mexico, where one of the first examples was found 80 years ago) and one fishtail fluted (a bifacial channel made on the base to aid firm hafting) spear points. Big news!
There had been no previous artifact evidence of a Paleo-Indian occupation in Costa Rica, except a lone Clovis point supposedly found in the early 20th century by Carl Harman, a Swedish archaeologist, in the northwestern Guanacaste province, site unknown. The students hadn't realized what they had picked up, but those points and several other kinds of Paleo-Indian chipped stone tools revealed to me the first solid evidence of a workshop and probably habitation site on a terrace overlooking the Reventazón River and perhaps a now-vanished lake. The early hunters would lie in wait for the giant mammals to arrive and drink and then ambush them. The source of the flint was found in large boulders washed out of an ancient limestone ridge and into a small stream right below the terrace.
I published this important discovery, first in Spanish in Vínculos, a professional journal I founded in the National Museum, and then in American Antiquity, the foremost U.S. archaeological journal. The Tico Times gave front-page coverage to the discovery (TT, Sept. 17, 1976), a tradition the paper has continued to the present.
But here is what I find fascinating: Clovis-type Paleo-Indian spear points are found from Central America north to Alaska, while contemporary fishtail spear points, so named for their shape, are known from Costa Rica all the way to Patagonia, the tip of South America. In Costa Rica, we now have recovered seven Clovis points and three fishtail points made by these first human inhabitants. But in Panama, seven fishtail points and only two Clovis points are documented. More than 10,000 years ago, Costa Rica's role as a major ancient cultural frontier was first recognized, and it continued from that time until the Spanish arrival in the early 1500s.
Interested? I certainly was, and in the following years this key cultural frontier aspect of ancient Costa Rica was substantiated time and time again.
Dr. Snarskis guides tours to Guayabo, an ancient city and ceremonial center near Turri-alba, and to all local museums. Direct queries to snarskis @racsa.co.cr or phone/fax 2235-8824. See his Web sites at www.archaeocostarica.com and www.arqueocostarica.net. Reserve tours at Costa Rica Outdoors Travel Division, www.info.costaricaoutdoors.com or call toll-free from North America at 1-800-8308-3394.
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