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SUNDAY SCIENCE: UNCOVERING AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF U.S. EMPIRE IN PANAMA  
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Charlotte Williams
June 26, 2025
Sapiens
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_ An anthropologist investigates how archaeology helped the U.S.
colonize the Panama Canal Zone—just as the current U.S. government
threatens to retake it. _

In Panama City, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio talks with Panama
Canal Authority Administrator Ricaurte Vasquez in February 2025, after
U.S. President Donald Trump threatened to “take back” the Panama
Canal Zone, a U.S. colony from 1904–1999., Mark
Schiefelbein/POOL/AFP/Getty Images

 

THE GREATER UNITED STATES

The United States has long controlled lands beyond its borders. From
military bases to informal colonies, the area that some refer to as
“the greater United States
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is a global scattering of U.S.-dominated enclaves well outside the 50
states.

And for the first time in a while, the government is reviving an
expansionist agenda.

The Trump administration seems to be tapping into histories
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justify occupation now—particularly of the Panama Canal Zone
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a former U.S. colony for nearly a century (1904–1999). Trump has
ventured that the U.S. should “take back
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the Canal Zone and that use of military force
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on the table.

Like any empire, be it Inka or Roman, U.S. imperialism has amassed a
material record, especially in its active, abandoned, and reclaimed
military bases [[link removed]].
From the Galápagos Islands to the Philippines, U.S.-based corporate
and military endeavors have left their footprints on landscapes
globally.

U.S. military bases are not technically considered to be U.S.
soil—but that hasn’t stopped the country’s citizens from digging
into it to lay foundations for buildings and infrastructure. In doing
so, they sometimes surfaced archaeological objects. And these pockets
of land can be legal gray areas for cultural heritage restrictions.

As a historian of archaeology, I’ve been researching how, over the
past centuries, U.S. transnational corporations and the U.S.
government used archaeology to expand influence. In the 1940s, many
famous American archaeologists circulated through Panama, taking
advantage of U.S. occupation. Today many of the objects extracted from
Panama under these imperial conditions remain in U.S. museums.

By tracing how these archaeological objects were taken from their
contexts, and where they traveled, we can start to understand how U.S.
imperialism jumbles historical landscapes—and contemporary ones.

AN AMERICAN APPENDAGE

Once a part of Colombia, the Department of Panama seceded in 1903 with
U.S. backing. In exchange for military protection against Colombia,
the newly formed Republic of Panama ceded land to the U.S. that would
form the Panama Canal Zone. A twin border of 5 miles along each canal
bank created a zipper of empire. Ships were protected on both sides by
U.S. territory.

A 1911 map outlines land that was either privately held or federally
controlled in the Panama Canal Zone, all of which was property claimed
by the United States.  Library of Congress/World Digital Library

The U.S. ruled the land as an American appendage
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a semi-sovereign area that in practice excluded Panamanian citizens
from the center of their own country. Until 1979, the Canal Zone
had separate infrastructure and governance
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Panama, including its own police force, courts, and schools.

In the creation of the zone, many Panamanians who had been living
there were forced out. In 1912, President William Howard Taft signed
the Panama Canal Act
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demanded that towns within the zone be razed to ensure the protection,
operation, and sanitation of the area. As scholars such as historian
Marixa Lasso have revealed, U.S. cartographers then rewrote
history, drawing maps
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filled with forests instead of the debris of razed towns. Such acts
helped create a narrative that the zone had been empty of people,
unproductive, and only made useful with U.S. intervention.

A 1909 photograph shows U.S. work on the “Culebra Cut,” a nearly
9-mile stretch that was excavated to link the Atlantic Ocean to the
Pacific for the Panama Canal.  W.A. Fishbaugh. Canal Zone Collection
(34) 1908–1909. Box 1. Middle American Research Institute (MARI)
Tulane University.

Over 40,000,000 pounds of dynamite were used to blast through rock and
soil for the Culebra Cut.  W.A. Fishbaugh. Canal Zone Collection (34)
1908–1909. Box 1. Middle American Research Institute (MARI) Tulane
University.

Another way that American civilians and government officials rewrote
Panama’s history was through archaeological research. The practice
of archaeology might seem like an afterthought of U.S. presence, but
it has long been understood by scholars as a tool that buttressed
empire
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National museums that eventually house archaeological material can be
hugely important institutions that create narratives about societies
and the nation’s relationship to them.

By the 1940s, American archaeologists were well established in the
Canal Zone, getting to conduct research somewhere “exotic” yet
legally under U.S. jurisdiction.

ARCHIVES OF WEEKEND ARCHAEOLOGY

In 1948, the U.S. Navy bulldozed a section of beach on Playa Venado
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an area that had formerly served as a U.S. firing range. As the
workers scraped sand and earth, they struck gold objects. The
bulldozer had sliced into an ancient society’s necropolis, where
more than 350 individuals had been lain to rest. Though archaeologists
at the time didn’t know it, recent work shows
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from A.D. 550–850, people used Playa Venado as a place to bury and
venerate loved ones. Within the graves, they tucked locally made
pottery and adorned the deceased
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jewelry shaped into frogs, birds, and mythical creatures.

The Navy’s accidental uncovering of an ancient cemetery inspired
newspaper articles and drove interested Americans to the site. Within
the Canal Zone, the cemetery was outside of Panamanian purview and
within U.S. domain. The U.S. Army began issuing permits to excavate
there—to any U.S. resident in the Canal Zone who applied.

Eager to claim a bit of Panama for themselves, soldiers dug without
documenting what they had found or where. Throughout the 1950s, Canal
Zone residents conducted what they called “weekend archaeology.”
Their largely haphazard digging privileged pillaging over recording
context. Some Canal Zone residents even started the “Archaeological
Society of Panama” and circulated journals to its members
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their adventures, private collections, and excavations at Playa
Venado.

The town of Empire was one of the largest in the Canal Zone, built
along the Panama Railroad. It was an ethnically diverse, majority
Black town, with immigrants from all over the world drawn to work on
the Canal’s construction.  W.A. Fishbaugh. Canal Zone Collection
(34) 1908–1909. Box 1. Middle American Research Institute (MARI)
Tulane University.

Weekend archaeologists were in contact with accredited archaeologists
as well as museums, private collectors, and professional looters,
called _huaqueros_. Because of these ties, objects from Playa Venado
sit today in U.S. museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York City and Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C. Many pieces came
to Dumbarton Oaks by way of diplomat Robert Bliss, an avid collector
of ancient art of the Americas who, upon learning about Playa Venado,
anonymously financed professional excavations at the site led by
archaeologist Samuel K. Lothrop.

Much of my research follows the paper trails of archaeological work.
In museum storerooms, I examine original identification tags, once
fixed to excavated objects. In basement archives, I delicately peel
apart pages of yellowing papers, stuffed in those quintessential mint
green filing cabinets of the 1960s.

I’m interested in how archaeologists came to know what they later
wrote about in official publications, and, crucially, what they left
out.

A 1951 photo of a hired worker at Samuel K. Lothrop’s excavation at
Playa Venado was taken by amateur archaeologist Kenneth Vinton.
 Courtesy of Ripon College, Kenneth Vinton Estate.

Since the summer of 2024, I’ve investigated letters between Canal
Zone residents and archaeologists to understand the mechanics of the
permitting process at Playa Venado. People such as Canal Zone resident
Karl P. Curtis wrote to John Alden Mason, an archaeologist who had
previously worked in Panama, asking for a letter of recommendation to
excavate Playa Venado.

“some of my friends got permission by the army and have found some
of the finest gold pendants I have ever seen. The shell work is
beautiful. Would you be willing to vouch for my being qualified to dig
at this site? The army officials need two recommendations.”

Mason was reluctant and nervous for his friend to conduct archaeology
with no training. He did provide the letter but with reservations:

“Frankly, the reason why I didn’t reply sooner was just because,
as I presume you realize, professional archaeologists always want to
discourage non-professionals from digging, and want all archaeological
sites to be left alone until some expedition from some institution can
dig them and put the objects in a museum and publish a report on the
scientific observations.”

A gold frog pendant, over 1,000 years old, taken from Playa Venado now
sits in a collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
City.  The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Bequest of
Nelson A. Rockefeller, 1979/Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mason was right to be concerned. Many conclusions about the Playa
Venado graves, not just made by amateurs, but also by professional
archaeologists, hypothesized that individuals had been brutally
murdered and sacrificed. For decades, these results fueled a
racialized narrative that ancient Panamanian people were naturally
violent.

A study in 2018 showed this interpretation is unsupported by the
evidence
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It seems, rather than violent deaths, the people buried at Playa
Venado received intimate care.

WRESTED HISTORY

Excavations at Playa Venado, and in the Canal Zone more broadly, may
have been a way to sidestep more stringent cultural heritage laws that
started to take effect in Panama in the 1940s. In 1941, Panama’s
government even amended its constitution
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better protect its cultural heritage after U.S.
archaeologists excavated Sitio Conte
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a necropolis on private land that yielded thousands of golden objects.
Decades later, Panamanian newspaper articles called the
excavations _“huaquería con __diploma”_ or “looting with a
diploma.”

The Canal Zone legally belonged to and helped construct U.S. empire.
Objects from it became enfolded into a growing idea of what was
“American.”

When the U.S. finally ceded the Canal Zone to Panama in 1979, former
military leader of Panama Omar Torrijos famously stated
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“_Yo no quiero entrar en la historia, quiero entrar en la Zona del
Canal_.” (“I don’t want to enter into history, I want to enter
into the Canal Zone.”)

U.S. imperialism entered both. It crossed contemporary borders, and
historic ones, and used archaeology to justify its presence. American
archaeologists claimed scientific superiority to understand Panama’s
past and harvested objects for U.S. consumers and institutions. The
excavations at Playa Venado show how the legal gray area of the Canal
Zone, coupled with the power of the military base, created a plot of
land from which ancient Panamanian history could be easily wrested.
Many of these objects remain in U.S. museums—after all, at the time,
the land from which they were plucked was ostensibly “American.”

_To learn more about the author’s work, listen on the SAPIENS
podcast: “Cementing the Past
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Bases like Playa Venado once peppered the Panamanian landscape. And in
April 2025, U.S. armed forces announced
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might place troops in these bases again, prompting some to call it a
“camouflaged invasion
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At the same time, the Trump administration is attempting to dictate
history [[link removed]]. The effort
includes an executive order—titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to
American History”—that calls for censorship and gutting of
museums
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investigate and share diverse pasts. Histories critical of U.S. empire
are at risk of getting erased from the public eye.

As an archaeology of the Canal Zone shows, controlling narratives
about the past emboldens occupations in the present.

_CHARLOTTE WILLIAMS [[link removed]] is an
anthropologist who studies the history of archaeology within U.S.
imperial projects. She received her Ph.D. from the University of
Pennsylvania, and this fall will start as an assistant professor at
the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently working on a
project about archaeology’s intersection with the United Fruit
Company and the Panama Canal Zone._

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OpenExo: an Open-Source Modular Exoskeleton to Augment Human Function
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Jack R. Williams, Chance F. Cuddeback, Shanpu Fang, Daniel Colley,
Noah Enlow, Payton Cox, Paul Pridham, and Zachary F. Lerner
Science (Robotics)
June 25, 2025

* Science
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* anthropology
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* Archaeology
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* Culture
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* History
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* imperialism
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* colonialism
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