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

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.