The past, glimpsed through gold

Stephan Salisbury has an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about a lot of gold:

Matt Gay, a mount maker at the Penn Museum, was standing in front of a display case filled with gold objects, when the sun streaked through a gallery window. "It was amazing," he said at the museum. "It was three in the afternoon, the shades were up in here, and the sun came through and hit that bead. It was like an intense light, like an LED blazing."
Gold does that sometimes.
Gay was at work helping install the museum's big 2015 exhibition, Beneath the Surface: Life, Death, and Gold in Ancient Panama, which opens on 7 February 2015 He was doing what he always does, unobtrusively setting delicate artifacts into unlikely positions. But this exhibition, which features more than two hundred artifacts removed from a cemetery site used a millennium ago, including many dazzling gold pieces, is even more challenging than usual.
The museum, at 33d and South Streets, has essentially set itself the task of doing the undoable. Each object, excavated in 1940 during an expedition to the isolated banks of the Rio Grande de Coclé in Panama, about a hundred miles southwest of Panama City, will seek to replicate the dig itself.
Objects will be displayed in the positions in which they were found in the ground, but the earth has been cleaned away from these spectacular remains, emblems of the mysterious Coclé culture, which flourished more than a thousand years ago and then collapsed. Now each object must be firmly secured in the air at a North American museum.
"This is one I'm particularly proud of," Gay said, leading the way to an intricate set of half a dozen delicate ceramic pots, all tipped at odd angles, cascading one above the other. There is no earth, only Gay's practically invisible armatures holding them afloat.
"The buzzword is 'seismically stable', " he said, referring to the firm, protective grasp of his mostly brass supports.
Little is known about the Coclé people, but hints can be teased out from these artifacts. They were expert goldworkers and incredibly imaginative ceramicists. There is no definite answer regarding the source of the gold. Some came in via trade, but there is recent evidence of ancient mining as well.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a fifteen-foot-high reimagining of the central burial site unearthed by the Penn team, led by J. Alden Mason. It housed remains of over twenty people, laid out on three different levels.
Penn archaeologists at the time, from what was then known as the University Museum, were at the forefront of archaeological work in Central and South America, and Panamanian dig leader Mason, the museum's associate curator, was a renowned archaeologist, anthropologist, and linguist. He was known for his work with Puerto Rican folklore; Mayan, Aztec, and Incan archaeology; and the languages of South American Indians.
Chief preparator Ben Neiditz designed the display cases and arranged them in relation to excavation drawings of the disintegrated human remains found with the artifacts.
The middle level of the key burial area contained one figure archaeologists refer to as the Paramount Chief. He was interred with a spectacular gold plaque, shining even in the shaded exhibition hall, and featuring a fanciful, highly polished figure modeled in shallow relief. The plaque, said lead exhibit curator and Penn anthropology professor Clark Erickson, "is spectacular. It shows a very important deity, composite animals, crocodile legs, streamer things coming out of the sides, a fantastic animal." In front of this gleaming, foot-wide plaque is an intricate molded gold pendant resembling a crocodile with a large emerald in its back.
Gold belts, ear rods, beads, necklaces are all on display, glistening testimony to the importance of the Paramount Chief and others buried with him.
Displaying the artifacts as they were found in the ground provides "context", Erickson said. A pendant ceases to be only a beautiful object; it becomes associated with a particular individual and a particular place. Interactive screens will help visitors understand the burial reconstructions.
Shedding light on the Coclé is only one part of the exhibition's effort at humanizing the artifacts. Penn also possesses a rich archive of excavation photographs, film, diaries, maps, drawings, journals, and other materials that bring the archaeologists and their work very much into the light. Much of this material will be on view.
"We're taking the objects and getting at the people, the culture, the iconography, the gold, the carvings," Erickson said. "The scholars, workers, the whole crew who worked there . . . they're all dead now. But we have their voices through diaries, letters, journals, and maps. We have the first color film of any dig. We have an incredible record. So we have the voices of the people of the past, and the voices of the people who did the work."

Rico says it's one exhibit he might have to get downtown to see...