About the Exhibit

In 1940, a Penn Museum expedition excavated rich and remarkable evidence of a thriving, Precolumbian civilization that had inhabited the region more than a thousand years before. River of Gold: Precolumbian Treasures from Sitio Conte features artifacts from the excavation and includes more than 120 extraordinary Precolumbian gold artifacts -- large-scale, hammered repoussé plaques, nose ornaments, gold-sheathed ear rods, pendants, bells, bangles and beads -- as well as detail-rich painted ceramics, and objects of precious and semi-precious stone, of ivory and of bone.

River of Gold tells the story of Penn Museum's 1940s excavations at the Precolumbian cemetery of Sitio Conte, Panama -- a site about 100 miles west of Panama City -- overlooked by gold-seeking Spaniards in the 16th century and centuries later exposed by the change in course of the Rio Grande de Coclé.

When burials in Sitio Conte's ancient cemeteries began to be exposed by the shift of the river's course, the Conte family, owners of the land, recognized the importance of the site and invited scientific excavation. The Peabody Museum of Harvard University carried out the first investigations in the 1930s. In the spring of 1940, archaeologist J. Alden Mason, then curator in Penn Museu's American Section, led a Museum team to carry out three months of excavations.

Above image: A view of the north side of Trench 2 shows the excavations of several burials, including Burial 11 in Sitio Conte, Panama. In the foreground are excavators John Mason, Julia Corning, and John Corning. Photo: Penn Museum.  (Image number 36795.)

While several burials were excavated, one multi-grave burial -- highlighted in the exhibition -- proved most spectacular, with great quantities of gold artifacts placed on and around the grave's chief occupant, a high status individual laid out on the middle level of the burial pit. Ethnohistoric information about life in 16th century Panama, as observed and recorded by Spanish conquistadors, is used to help understand the ancestral Panamanian peoples who used the Sitio Conte cemetery from about AD 700 to 900. At the time of the Spanish Conquest, Spaniards recorded the presence of numerous chiefdoms, ruled by a quevi, or high chief, and organized into two basic social levels -- an elite group controlling most of the power and wealth, and a far more numerous commoner group.

Archaeological evidence from the ancient Sitio Conte cemetery reflects a two-tiered society like that described in Spanish accounts some 600 to 800 years later, and suggests that events and rituals surrounding the burial of the grave's chief occupant were similar to those observed for the quevi in the late 16th century. Goldsmiths of the New World were consummate artisans, and those who created the gold objects found in the Sitio Conte cemetery were no exceptions. The plaques and cuffs were crafted from hammered gold sheet. Exquisitely detailed pendants were one-of-a-kind items, formed by the lost-wax casting method.

In the 1980s, scientists in Penn Museum's Applied Science Center for Archaeology (MASCA) analyzed the materials to learn more about them. All of the plaques, beadwork and castings were made of a gold/copper alloy, called tumbaga by metallurgists, some with a copper content of 25% or more; goldsmiths employed a complex depletion gilding process which dissolved away the copper on the surface, leaving a bright, pure gold color and a composition which entirely masked the reddish-hued alloy beneath. Both the goldwork and the polychrome painted pottery found with it were usually decorated with animal motifs reflective of the great diversity of species in central Panama.

Animals and humans often appear as composite forms. Two motifs in particular are embossed on thirteen gold plaques found in the largest burial at the cemetery: a reptilian-human figure, and a bird-human figure with some reptilian features. Long assumed that animal-human motifs depicted gods, more recent interpretations of these designs, based on analogies with myths of indigenous people living in the region today and identification of animal species, suggest that warriors selected animals for use as family or warfare insignias.

Right image: Cast-Gold Bat Effigy Pendant. H: .8 in, W: 1.7 in, Th .4 in. Photo: Penn Museum. (Object number: 40-12-33.)