PHILADELPHIA
Visitors to a new exhibit of dazzling gold artifacts and other ancient treasures have a fickle river in central Panama to thank for it.
When the Rio Grande de Cocle changed course in the early 1900s, a tantalizing cache of golden beads and pottery pieces washed upon its banks. Mysterious accounts of a river flowing with gold enticed a University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology excavation team to the site in 1940.
There, they uncovered the cemetery of a thriving pre-Columbian settlement previously unknown to historians and dating from approximately 700 A.D. to 900 A.D. About 150 of the most important artifacts they excavated are on display at the museum’s “River of Gold” exhibit opening Sunday.
“There have been a lot of excavations in Panama since then,” said Pamela Jardine, curator of the exhibit. “But no one has ever come up with another of these large graves.”
Archaeologists from Harvard University’s Peabody Museum first visited the site in Sitio Conte, Panama, about 100 miles west of Panama City, in the 1930s. The Conte family, who owned the land, invited Harvard and Penn archaeologists to the site after realizing the significance of the treasures the shifting river was pushing to the surface.
Buried on and around the three-tier grave site’s 1,000-year-old skeletons were gold pendants, bracelets, beads and small chest plates. The level of artistry and technical prowess astonished the archaeologists, Jardine said.
