LAFAYETTE — Once undisturbed for more than 1,000 years, the cache of rare items making up the River of Gold exhibit at the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum beckons visitors with its eclectic pieces and beauty.
On loan from the University of Pennsylvania, the exhibit will be displayed until May 3, when it travels to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.
Around Central and South America, rumors had run rampant for years about the gold pebbles used by children for toys. In the early 19th century, the Rio Grande de Coclé in the Coclé Province in central Panama flooded its banks during the rainy season, sometime from December to April.
“Everybody knows about the pirates of the Caribbean, but very few people remember why the pirates were hanging out in the Caribbean in the first place,” said Jennifer Hamilton, head of visitor services and volunteer manager for the Hilliard Museum.
“It was because the Spanish had made Panama the colonial headquarters for getting everything to Spain.”
“And also Cartagena in Colombia,” added Claudia Méndez, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette graduate student in communication.
She is a native of Colombia who works in public relations for the museum.
“It was the most important port for the entry of gold for the Spaniards.”
Overflowing its banks and cutting a new channel, the Rio Grande de Coclé revealed the secret buried beneath its currents since before William of Normandy conquered England in 1066.
That secret was the more than 30 burial sites, including “Burial 11,” which housed a total of 23 interments on three levels and is considered to be the richest burial site found by archaeologists in the Americas.
On the middle of the three levels, the site housed an ancient Panamanian paramount chief, or queví, along with a plethora of gold discs, nose rings, other ornamental pieces worn by people during his time and more than 3,000 gold necklaces buried on or near the chief’s body.
This site, dubbed Sitio Conte, for the Conte family on whose land the burial area was found, is approximately 100 miles southeast of Panama City.
In pre-Columbian times, the political borders were non-existent. Instead, the area that makes up modern-day Panama, Colombia, Venezuela and parts of Brazil and Peru was called “Le Grand Colomb,” or the Great Colombia.
The Chibcha-speaking tribes in the area had their own borders. All the indigenous people’s history was found in the pottery and wall drawings, but they were all destroyed by the Spanish Conquistadors, who destroyed everything they did not see as valuable or saw as pagan.
“The history we have of the Native Americans is the Spanish and European version of them, not their own,” Méndez said.
Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology began the first excavation in the 1930s, but the archaeologists failed to uncover anything of great value.
The real finds came in the 1940s when J. Alden Mason, curator of the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s American section, took over the excavation of Sitio Conte.
Mason used early forms of motion picture filming to document the dig.
It is believed the indigenous peoples used Sitio Conte as a burial ground for more than 500 years, the earliest being around 450-700 A.D. and Burial 11 around 700-900 A.D.
Mason discovered the unnamed chief on the middle level of Burial 11.
The Panamanians, like the Egyptians, believed in killing and burying servants for chiefs and priests so that those heralds would be able to serve their masters in the afterlife. Most of the skeletons were found face down, meaning they were commoners or servants.
Thorough examination of the some of the gold artifacts revealed that it was not pure, but contains 3 percent silver and 0.2 percent copper.
All the plaques, beads and headdresses are made of a copper/gold alloy called tumbaga, which contains a copper content of 25 percent and higher.
“I wish there was some way you could see what the pieces looked like when they were new,” said Amanda Burleigh, a junior in mass communication at ULL who toured the exhibit.
“Some of them are kinda worn and beaten up. I bet they were really beautiful when they were first made. It’s amazing that they had the ability to create such intricate pieces so long ago.”
Some of the more interesting pieces are animal effigies worn by the chief to indicate his high status and prominence.
The pieces are rare in their detail and composition. They combined animal features, such as an alligator’s body with a bat’s head, to create beautiful jewelry. The minuscule detail by the craftsmen using primitive tools is astonishing.
The most significant find was the intricately carved animal effigy pendant embedded with a pristine emerald.
Other pieces include a handful of gold-sheathed pendants made of bone, resin and whale-tooth ivory and polychrome pottery with animal imagery and symmetrical designs.
The most alluring pieces are the gold.
“Gold is always cool to look at and knowing the crazy history behind these pieces really makes it interesting,” Burleigh said.
Hamilton described the early residents’ love of gold as something beyond the aesthetic.
“We think of gold as something that’s worth money and maybe it might be pretty but for them it was something more than that,” Hamilton said.
“It did communicate class, but it also was part of religion. It was part of their understanding of spirituality. God was in the light.
“Anything that was shiny not only was a symbol of that light and that spiritual power, but some of those people believed that those objects would actually store, like a battery, divine energy, and so when you wore those gold objects, it was like you were strapped up to all these Duracell batteries that have divine power.”
“The light comes from the sun and the sun is God,” Méndez added.
http://www.2theadvocate.com/news/18032674.html?showAll=y&c=y
By RYAN BROUSSARD
Special to The Advocate
Published: Apr 23, 2008 – Page: 1BA – UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.
