by Pat Werner
A while ago, I was invited by the city fathers of Diriamba, my hometown in Nicaragua, to give a talk about the pre-colonial heritage of Diriamba. About 40 km from Managua in the southern tablelands, it is the coolest and windiest of the towns on the meseta de los pueblos. About 2000 feet above sea level, it has a cool and enjoyable climate.
The city fathers wanted the scoop on the Indians of Diriamba and so I gave it to them. The town was quite small when the Spaniards came in the 1520s and in the first census of 1548, it only had a few puny encomiendas (estates run by Spaniards with the right to tax the locals).
Ethnically, the Indians of Diriamba were Chorotegas and they spoke the language that linguists would later call Oto Mangue. It was completely unrelated to Nahuatl but was closely related to Chiapaneco, spoken in southern Mexico. In the 1581 census, the town appears with the name Diriamborí. There are various ceramic pots in private collections from Diriamba and some petroglyphs are found scattered around the area. The pots usually date from the period of 1000 AD to 1500 AD, with a few dating back to 300-800 AD. This is nothing new and is typical of the pottery found throughout the southern highlands.