2 cols.

Embossed gold plaque were attached to the garments of high-ranking members of society and were breastplates during battle.

2 cols.

Cast-gold composite animal effigy pendant with emerald imported from Colombia.

MUST RUN 9/21

PENN MUSEUM ‘RIVER OF GOLD: PRECOLUMBIAN TREASURES’ SEPTEMBER 23 w/2 cuts

ak/gs set 9/14

PHILADELPHIA, PENN. — The Rio Grande de Cocle in central Panama, subject to flooding during the region’s rainy season, has had a long history of shifting its course. In the early 1900s, stories began to circulate of children playing marbles with gold beads found in the great river. It wasn’t until the late 1920s, however, when large quantities of gold ornaments were discovered, that news of the phenomenon — a veritable “river of gold” — really began to spread. In 1940, a Penn Museum expedition excavated rich and remarkable evidence of a thriving, pre-Columbian civilization that had inhabited the region more than a thousand years before.

“River of Gold: Pre-Columbian Treasures from Sitio Conte” opens at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on Sunday, September 23. The exhibition, which features artifacts from Penn Museum’s 1940 excavation, includes more than 120 extraordinary pre-Columbian gold artifacts — large-scale, hammered repousse plaques, gold-sheathed ear rods, nose ornaments, pendants, bells, bangles and beads — as well as detail-rich painted ceramics, objects of precious and semi-precious stone, of ivory and of bone. “River of Gold” runs through December 16, before beginning a multi-city national tour.

“River of Gold” tells the story of Penn Museum’s 1940 excavations at the pre-Columbian cemetery of Sitio Conte, Panama — a site about 100 miles west of Panama City — overlooked by gold-seeking Spaniards in the Sixteenth Century and centuries later exposed by the change in course of the Rio Grande de Cocle.

The exhibition brings together evidence uncovered by archaeologists to begin to understand the culture of these enigmatic pre-Columbian people who left such sophisticated art, including gold work. In addition to the artifacts, the exhibition uses text panels, archival photographs, detailed excavation drawings, maps and videotaped segments from original 1940 color film footage of the excavation.

While several burials were excavated by Penn Museum curator, J. Alden Mason, 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 Sixteenth 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 CE 700 to 900.

Goldsmiths of the New World were consummate artisans, and those who created the gold objects found in the Sitio Conte cemetery were not exceptions. The plaques and cuffs were crafted from hammered gold sheets. Exquisitely detailed pendants were one-of-a-kind items, formed by the lost-wax casting method.

Penn Museum is at 3260 South Street on the University of Pennsylvania campus. For information, 215-898-4000 or www.museum.upenn.edu.