PCG = Pre-Columbian Gold

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About PCG = Pre-Columbian Gold

The Costa Rican metallurgical tradition was imported from Colombia, and its hallmarks include a casting method involving wax and the use of gold-copper alloys to make the metal more malleable. The earliest pieces, in an introductory section, are small and realistic; some are trade goods from Colombia, Ms. Fernández Esquivel says. In southern Costa Rica, the discovery of gold deposits meant that artisans could afford to be more profligate, and the artifacts are bigger and bolder.

In a niche in a stair landing, the museum has re-created a major burial, showing a profusion of reproduction gold discs and other objects, 88 in all, whose originals are in the museum's collection. Downstairs are a short video, a section explaining the technology of hammering, casting and decorating gold, and models and dioramas dramatizing daily life in the hierarchical agricultural societies that produced these artifacts.

The gold, though clearly the star of the show, is interspersed with stone carvings, jade and ceramics, to highlight continuities in imagery and function. The same approach characterizes the museum's current temporary exhibition, "Birds of Stone, Clay, and Gold in Pre-Columbian Costa Rica," on view all year. Costa Rican artisans, living amid 880 bird species, naturally drew on avian imagery, and objects featuring the eagle, hawk and other powerful birds were markers of high social status.

In Peru and other countries, gold was used to fashion armor and musical instruments, according to Ms. Fernández Esquivel. But in Costa Rica, she says, gold objects were less utilitarian and more often "symbols of prestige and rank." Warriors, for example, projected fierceness and social standing with pectorals, headdresses, armbands and nose pins. Shamans, considered conduits between the natural and supernatural worlds, were represented by finely worked pendants that combined human and animal features, often in the form of masks.

Women were metaphorically linked with the butterfly—perhaps, Ms. Fernández Esquivel says, because the flitting of the butterfly evoked their chatter. The curator opens and closes the fingers of her hand quickly in a motion that suggests both rapid conversation and the butterfly's flight.
The Museo del Oro, formed in 1939 to collect and preserve a part of the cultural and artistic patrimony of Colombia, then had 6,726 items, 4 times the number of pre-Hispanic gold objects from Colombia in all the other museums and private collections in the world.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLD4JetWUVc

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