Barriles (known also as Sitio Barriles or by the designation BU-24) is one of the most famous archaeological sites in Panama. It is located in the highlands of the Chiriquí Province of Western Panama at 1200 meters above sea level. It is several kilometers west of the modern town of Volcán. This places the site in the Gran Chiriquí culture area (encompassing Western Panama and much of Southern Costa Rica, parts of the even broader Intermediate Area or Isthmo-Colombian Area). The site was originally named for several small stone barrels found in the area, although these have also been found elsewhere in the Río Chiriquí Viejo valley and in Costa Rica. This area has a cool, spring-like climate with a pronounced rainy season between May and November, and a dry but windy season the rest of the year. The region lies on the western flanks of Volcán Barú, a dormant volcano and the highest mountain in Panama.

Like El Caño in Central Panama or Panamá Viejo in Panama City, Barriles is one of the few archaeological sites in Panama regularly accessible to the public. The northwestern portion of the site is accessible to the public through the Landau finca (which is a private property), who have a variety of artifacts on display in their yard, in the walls of a fake excavation block, and in a small private museum.^{[citation needed]} Not all of the artifacts on display were found on-site. The family offers guided tours of the collections and their gardens in both Spanish and English.

The site is believed to have once been a socioceremonial center with a substantial residential population between 500-1000 individuals. It contains a small mound which was once associated with a row of 14 statues. Ten of these depicted solitary individuals, while four included one individual- often chubbier, taller, wearing a conical hat and ornaments- riding atop the shoulders of a naked man, though some of these individuals also wore conical hats. Many scholars have interpreted these double individual statues as evidence for the existence of higher and lower status social groups within Barriles. A large metate (grinding stone) whose border was adorned by tiny stone heads has also been interpreted as evidence for violence or human sacrifice in the past. Many of the statues and the metate are on currently display in the Museo Antropológico Reina Torres de Araúz in Panama City.

Barriles was largely occupied during the Aguas Buenas period (A.D. 300-900) (see ), known locally as the Bugaba period. Nine radiocarbon dates have been taken from Barriles, six of them clustering between A.D. 500-800 (or the Late Bugaba phase). Pottery from this period was generally unpainted and occasionally included engraved, incised and appliqué decorations. Stone artifacts, including small chips created from the manufacture of stone tools (i.e. blades, axes, and metates), were generally made from andesite, basalt, rhyolite, and chert. Organic materials, like plant fibers and animal bones, have not preserved well in the acidic soils.

The Aguas Buenas period was preceded by the Tropical Forest Archaic (4600-2300 B.C.), which is known from rockshelter sites found outside of the valley. The Concepción Phase (roughly 300 BC to AD 400) was associated with the earliest ceramic using populations in the area, and evidence suggests that populations were low and spatially dispersed, though more sites are known from lower elevations. The Aguas Buenas period was associated with the development of settlement system containing large villages and small farmsteads. The subsequent Chiriquí Phases (AD 900-1500) witnessed the dissolution of the previous villages, and populations returned to ephemeral and spatially dispersed patterns. This suggests that major population reorganization during the sequence may have been associated with the political and ceremonial rise and decline of Barriles.

A hypothetical AD 600 eruption of nearby Volcán Baru was thought to have devastated other archaeological settlements upstream from Barriles, prompting a movement into, and subsequent colonization of, the Caribbean watershed. Recent geological and archaeological work has seriously questioned the veracity of the AD 600 eruption, and evidence now points toward a much later eruption event, possibly around AD 1400. Recent archaeological work in the Caribbean watershed has also raised the possibility of earlier and denser populations than previously believed.

Barriles was the subject of early archaeological investigations by Dr. Matthew Stirling (the late 1940s), who did not publish extensively on his findings. Stirling was the archaeologist who recovered fragments of the Barriles statues and the large metate. Alain Ichon and Wolfgang Haberland (1950s and 1960s) were interested in studying the ceramics from Barriles, and collected samples from a few small excavations.

In the early 1970s, in the region (and other areas in Western Panama) became the focus of the multi-year Adaptive Radiations project led by the Panamanian archaeologist Dr. Olga Linares. The project involved several influential figures in modern Central American archaeology, including Dr. Richard Cooke, Dr. Anthony Ranere, and Dr. Payson Sheets. This project surveyed a portion of the Río Chiriquí Viejo valley and identified dozens of sites. They concluded that the Río Chiriquí Viejo was once home to substantial and complexly populations supported by maize agriculture. According to them, this was not as easily possible in the neighboring Caribbean lowlands, which did not exhibit the same complex social organization as the mountains. The accuracy and implications of last point has become the subject of considerable debate. Some collections of ceramics and lithics from this project are housed in Temple University. The site was then briefly revisited by Dr. Catherine Shelton in the 1980s, but the majority of her work dealt with sites at lower elevations. The Argentinian scholar Dr. Vidal Fraitts studied the Barriles statues during the 1990s, but did not conduct new fieldwork at the site.