Housed in Panama Canal Zone-style building in the former zone’s hospital district, the Center for Tropical Paleoecology and Archaeology convenes geologists, archaeologists and paleoecologists who piece together the history of tropical peoples and habitats. With a wide repertoire of techniques, some pioneered at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), CTPA scientists study changes in tropical communities over long time-scales and ask how the earliest known peoples of the tropics understood and used natural resources to survive.