ENGLISH

Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia. A Symposium Dumbarton Oaks, 9 and 10 OCtober 1999

By (eds.) , Jeffrey Quilter , & Dumbarton Oaks

Book information

Publisher
Dumbarton Oaks Trustees; Harvard University,
Year
2003
ISBN
0884022943
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
17 MB (17371293 bytes)
Series
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
Pages
419+x\435
Topic
History Archaeology
Orientation
portrait
Paginated
yes
Scanned
yes
Time added
2020-12-12 22:57:37
Colombia; Andes; Costa Rica; Panama; Gold; Gold Mi

Description

he lure of gold as a source of quick and bountiful cash led to looting on a vast scale in southern Central America and Colombia. Overgrown ridge-top cemeteries in Costa Rica, picked clean a century ago, now resemble tropical versions of World War I battlefields, their surfaces riddled with the pockmarks of looters’ picks rather than mortar shells. Thousands of gold “eagles” and other items poured out of the Intermediate Area to the extent that some of the smaller pieces were commonly used as watch fobs at the turn of the last century. Despite these items’ ubiquity and the row upon row of bright, shiny objects lining museum cases and collectors’ cabinets, the number of gold objects scientifically excavated from the region (excluding Sitio Conte) could easily fit on a standard dining room table. The symposium and the papers presented represent a summation and a starting point. More than a century ago, William Henry Holmes wrote the first extensive treatise on archaeological remains from Chiriquí, in western Panama. The nineteenth-century gold rush had produced considerable quantities of related materials for scholarly study although no formal archaeological fieldwork had been done.

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