The 'aguilas' exemplify the same problem. The principal deity of the Bribri was called Sibu, or Sibó. He was the creator of ah things; he brought the seeds from which the first human beings sprouted; he taught the people to dance, selected the clans from which shamans were drawn, and he distributed all the different kinds of jobs. And he took the form of a large-beaked bird. In the words of a Bribri song (Stone 1962: 64):

Sibu came in the form of

a buzzard dressed as a man,

collar on his neck

The collar reflected.

He came with the collar

So, do the bird-men and collared aguilas of the Veraguas-Gran Chiriquí style represent Sibu, or are they transformed shamans, or clan badges, or symbols of rank - or are they something entirely different and completely unpredictable?

My point is that interpretations of this kind, however plausible, are no more than guesses based on selective use of ethnographic analogies. They are there fore unprovable, and are archaeologically untestable.

There are, however, ways of manipulating symbolic data that do not depend on knowing the meanings of the icons. Fig. 5 gives a preliminary list of the forms of chimeras recorded in the subregions under discussion. The Muiscas and their neighbours on the Colombian altiplano pose special problems (see below), but elsewhere the prediction of a pan-Chibchan belief-system seems to be confirmed. Many icons occur in several of the regional columns, in cluding the one for the Taironas of northeastern Colombia. Significantly, there is one Caribbean subregion which does not fit the pattern and which cannot be included in the chart. This is the Sinú zone (Fig. 4), which lacks most of the typical forms (in particular the composites) and has a tradition of naturalism, with lifelike animals and human genre scenes, found no where else (Falchetti 1995).

Fig. 4. Archaeological zones of Colombia and Central America.

The macro-region defined on the basis of its shared iconographic system also defines itself in other ways. In all  the relevant Isthmian-Caribbean subregions except one (and again the Sinú is the exception) languages of the Chibchan family were spoken at the time of Spanish conquest (Fig. 3). The map gives the present day (residual) distribution of the Isthmian languages, restores Cuna to its 15th century homeland, and adds extinct languages which have disappeared during the centuries after European contact.

I do lot believe this correspondence is accidental. The most econornical explanation is that we have a widespread cultural tradition (reminiscent of the culture-arcas fashionable in anthropology at the turn of the century) defined by Chibchan languages and by a distinct system of beliefs and ícons. This would not be surprising. Archaeological evidence, together with un guistic and genetic studies of the Chibchan groups in the Isthmus, indicate that there have been no large-scale migrations unto or out of that area (Barrantes et al. 1990). The Chibcha-speaking communities of Panama and Costa Rica seem to have lived close together for a long time, and we would therefore expect to find many shared cultural traits (Bray 1984: 308), but - at a more speculative level - we might also keep in mind the debate about how (or and whether) the structure of a language influences cognition and expression on the part of those who speak it.