This is aleventh is a series of articles describing the archeology and cultural evolution of human groups in Costa Rica by Michael J. snarkis, Ph. D., one of Costa rica’s foremost archaeologists. Dr. Snarkis founded and directed the Archaeological Research Program at the National Museum for 10 years and was Professor of Archeology at the University of Costa Rica for 14 years.
The first article in this three-part description of the Late period un pre-Columbian Costa Rica illustrated typical village settlement patterns, hose forms and tombs. The second showed polychrome pottery and stone sculpture that was markedly different from earlier periods, and this article presents a selection of striking cast and hammered gold pendants that inspired the first Spanish arrivals to name the country Costa Rica – “Rich Coast.”
Just as jade, first carved in Mesoamerica to the north as early as 1000 B.C., was for many centuries before and after Christ the most precious, revered and sacred symbol of high status in Costa Rica, after around A.D. 800, gold replaced jade in that role. In the Americas, metallurgy was far earlier in South America, with hammered cooper ornaments producers as early as 1400 B.C in the Peruvian Andes. By 400-200 B.C., rather sophisticated cast gold pendants were being produced in Colombia, and the first gold objects in Costa Rica were apparently trade items made in Colombia.
Metallyrgical technology reached Costa Rica some time between A.D. 400-700, supplanting jade carving, which died out along with four-cornered houses and crisp re-on-buff pottery. Metallurgy did not diffuse northward to Mesoamerica until around A.D. 800. The Mesoamerican high civilizations produced wonderful gold jewelry after that time, but it never replaced jade as the most sacred symbolic material.
Sources and Alloys
In South America, metallurgy was produced in alloys of gold, copper and silver, as well as almost pure objects of each metal. In Costa Rica, some pendants were virtually pure gold, but most had varying percentages of copper, with some almost all copper. It is an interesting fact that a mixture of gold and copper individually; thus, casting was facilitated and more gold was saved. Objects with a higher percentage of copper tend to oxidize to a powdery light green after centuries in the ground.
In Costa Rica, gold was obtained by panning for placer deposits in rivers, and the first Spanish noted that quite large nuggets were recovered. Copper occurs in nature as leafy, fern-like forms when pure. The rivers on the Osa Peninsula in southwest Costa Rica were apparently the richest in gold, and that is deflected in the great her quantity of gold pendants produced there. This sub-region, known as Diquis, is the northern part of the Greater Chiriqui Region that includes a portion of adjacent Panama, today’s national frontier.
Throughout the archaeological record for Diquis, it was always that part of Costa Rica most clearly and closely related to northern South America, as seen in the styles of its artifacts: negative or resist painting is more common, just as it is in Colombia, and even a llama is portrayed in a late Terrago Biscuit ware vessel.
No llamas were ever in Costa Rica, so either people from Diquis traveled to the northern Andes to see them, or a realistic effigy, perhaps of wood, made its way to southwestern Costa Rica.
Symbolism and Representational Themes
Like all pre-Columbian artifacts that have any decoration at all or a form other than purely functional, all the products of metallurgy possessed a strong and complex religious symbolism that was quite well defined by their makers and immediately recognized by all others in their social group, and probably far beyond. Archaeologists and art historians today recognize many repeated themes, but the totality of symbolic nuances and iconography is mostly inaccessible to us. We may recognize a certain bird of animal species, but what did each really signify to the culture that produced the artifacts?
In the case of the older jade artifacts, Mesoamerican sources tell us that the different tones of greenish jade symbolized deep pools of water and young green maize plants, among others hand, suggests a solar, celestial symbolism, its physical nature lending itself to shiny, reflective surfaces. The hammered and embossed gold disks known from Diquis are very likely basic sun symbols, because when the sun is able to be observed through thin clouds, for instance, it appears as a two-dimensional disk. On the other hand, the moon on very clear nights gives a hint of three-dimensionality to the naked eye, and it is my hypothesis that the famous stone spheres of this period in Diquis are lunar symbols.
The first Spanish in Costa Rica described warriors wearing copious gold ornaments into battle, small-scale war face being endemic during the Late Period. In short, glittering gold may be seen as having a showy, even aggressive aspect, while many jade pendants seem to convey a serene, contemplative mood. Indeed, I personally feel that the jade working period, circa 300 B.C. to A.D. 400, was relativity long, peaceful time, to judge by the character of all artifacts produced during that span. Ceramics were very well crafted and fired, their re-on-buff elegant lines far superior in quality to all the pottery that followed; all stone tools were carefully sculpted, even mullers or manos, while in the gold-working period unmodified cobbles of approximately the right size were used.
It is also notable that the motifs most often portrayed in gold are fierce chief sand warriors, usually masked as or surrounded by images of their animal cohorts, mostly crocodiles or alligators, jaguars or eagles and other birds of prey. The noted British archaeologist Warwick Bray has observed that the major food animals – tapirs, deer, wild hogs, peccaries, domestic dogs, and river fish are rarely portrayed in gold. Instead, we see frogs of toads, alligators, jaguars, bats, rapacious birds, turtles, crabs, lobsters, armadillos, scorpions and spiders. Most of these animals have shells or other hard body parts and are fierce, noxious or dangerous: they nip, sting, bite, such blood, or are poisonous. When fish are depicted, they are sharks.
This panoply of belief-system images in gold is quite distinct from that associated with jade carvings. In parts, this must be related to the very different physical characteristics of jade and gold, but it also seems to reflect a more bellicose, stressful world with a larger population competing for basic resources and prestige items. The Spanish noted that battle captives were taken for slaves or for human sacrificial rites.
For reasons unknown as yet, the last century before the Spanish arrival in 1501 curiously produced very few clearly dateable archaeological remains, and the strong cultural traditions observed in earlier times seem to be attenuated. Irenically, the gold objects found in a few tombs also containing European glass beads and iron tools are simple rolls of gold foil to be used as beads, much like the first metal artifacts found in the Peruvian Andes 3000 years before.
People and Society 
