Mythologies of Gold in Chocó

As gold prices rose between 2002 and 2012, Afro-descendant gold miners confronted illegal outsider-owned gold mines on their land in Colombia’s northwest Chocó department. This article examines why these Afro-descendant miners, who used hand tools and techniques, often invited the outsiders, who used heavy machinery and mercury, to work their mines. Their reasons included: familial pressure over land, profit sharing, high prices, access to gold, and dangerous working conditions. The decision to invite in the outsiders complicates the conventional narrative of a coercive relationship between outsiders and Afro-descendant communities, even as the relationship produced worse than expected outcomes for both sides.

Anthropologica, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

2003

The chapters in this volume represent the great progress in knowledge about the ancient peoples of Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia we have made since Holmes wrote those lines. At the same time, however, many fundamental questions remain unanswered, and most of the chapters clearly reveal the potential for future research in every area of this part of ancient America. Volume Overview Nicholas Saunders opens the book by locating the high value placed by Amerindians on metals within a larger symbolic system that esteemed shiny things. He convincingly argues that such appreciation of bright things was widespread (even stretching beyond the New World) and of long duration in the nonmonetary societies of the ancient Americas. This model can be tested and examined in the specif ic, different contexts of New World societies for many years to come. Certainly, ample support for Saunders's theory is provided many times in the succeeding chapters and in the exhibit cases of museums throughout the world in which the treasures of the ancient New World are displayed. The following chapter brings together one of the most active proponents of a unitary vision of the southern Isthmian and Colombian region, Oscar Fonseca Zamora, and a sympathetic North American colleague, John Hoopes. Together they review the linguistic and physical evidence for patterns of similarities and differences in Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, a region they call the Isthmo-Colombian Area. As a straightforward geographical reference, the term avoids the danger of essentialism in designating this location a culture here. In the sense that bridges link places and the Darién links the continent with the isthmus, however, the title seemed appropriate. 4 Jeffrey Quilter area. Detached from the Intermediate Area, the region is no longer framed in a dependent relationship with Mesoamerica, to the north, or the Central Andes, to the south. Fonseca and Hoopes bring together information supporting the idea of local development within an overall framework of shared cultural practices. Richard Cooke and colleagues address questions asked by lay people and scholars alike: Who made gold artifacts? Who exchanged gold? Who used gold ornaments, and how were they worn? In answering these questions, the authors offer a scholarly treatise, providing the most thorough discussion of Panamanian gold sources to date, as well as a further introduction to the range of issues in the volume. They demonstrate how the use of ethnology, ethnohistory, and geology in combination with archaeology can be valuable not simply as a source of information to augment one f ield or another, but as an element in producing a sum of knowledge greater than its parts. For these authors, the power in "gold and power" is the role of the metal in social ranking and in exchange systems. Questioning Mary Helms's (1979) proposition that long distances and the exotic nature of goods and associated knowledge that accompanied them were vehicles for political power, they argue for conf irmation by tracing the specif ic nature, origins, and distribution of such goods. It is a mark of how far investigations in Panama and neighboring countries have advanced in the last two decades that such research is now not only feasible but is also being carried out. This is evidenced by Cooke and colleagues' (2000) recent f ieldwork at Cerro Juan Díaz, where a number of different vectors-precious shell carvings, goldwork, ceramics, and funerary customs-are being examined as complex and dynamically interrelated phenomena. Although the physical evidence of early gold technology is extremely important, the testing of Helms's thesis is equally valuable. There may have been numerous means by which gold circulated in southern Central America and Colombia. Michael Snarskis addresses the important issue of the shift from jade to gold as the material of precious value in Costa Rica. Drawing upon his extensive knowledge of prehistoric Costa Rica, Snarskis demonstrates that the shift was not an isolated occurrence, but part of other signif icant developments as evidenced in changes in mortuary practices, settlement patterns, house forms, and a variety of artifact styles. As Snarskis notes, these changes represent the physical manifestations of transformations in the organization of society and in belief systems that likely were much more important to the ancient inhabitants of the region than was gold. In addition to sharing his insights into these shifts, the author also provides the reader with valuable summaries of the archaeology of Costa Rica, especially the Central Valley and Atlantic Watershed zones. In their contribution to the volume, Patricia Fernández and If igenia Quintanilla examine linkages between stone sculpture, metallurgy, and the expression of power in the Diquís Delta of southern Costa Rica. This is one of the better-known areas in the greater region, among English speakers, due to the work of Doris Stone (1977) and Samuel Lothrop (1963) as well as a general fascination with the large stone balls characteristic of the zone. In addition to providing some of the f irst detailed English-language studies of the area's stone balls and metallurgy, Fernández and Quintanilla provide important information on and interpretations of the relationships between different symbols of power. Their discussion of the Jeffrey Quilter posits a f ifteen-hundred-year cultural tradition extending from the Tairona archaeological culture to the contemporary Kogi peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Bray's contribution provides a wealth of information with broad implications for the goals of this volume. He examines the complexity of Tairona political organization as reported by the Spanish with references to capitanes, principales, capitanes de guerra, and mandadores, among others. He also reviews Tairona gold styles, links between symbolism, concepts of power, and gold objects, and the intriguing evidence from a Nahuange tomb of an early Colombian polished stone tradition resembling the better-known and-documented polished stone complex of Costa Rica. He argues for much more complex patterns of interchange between peoples of mainland South American and the isthmus than have been considered previously, thus echoing the cautionary remarks raised by Langebaek. In addition to this rich serving of information and ideas, Bray provides an intriguing discussion of Kogi interpretations of ancient gold. He then applies the cautionary brakes, however, through a reminder that these ideas, like the analyses in this book, are contemporary interpretations of the works of ancient peoples who may have had very different views than those of today or those of the Kogi. An extensive appendix of documented f inds of Tairona metalwork is an added bonus to a fascinating and provocative essay. Ana María Falchetti continues the focus on Colombia, with a look at the symbolic dimensions of the technology of gold objects. The symbolic power of lost-wax casting techniques, the nature of copper-gold alloys, and patterns of exchange of precious goods were seen as expressions of processes of transformation. Falchetti skillfully melds ethnographic, archaeological, and materials analyses into a sparkling interpretive alloy. A signal point here is that the value of metals was not always their physical stability or slowness in tarnishing. Rather, the change from bright to dull was appreciated. This seems, at f irst, counterintuitive to people raised with a Western appreciation of a hierarchy of substances in which those that change least are valued most. Metals in Colombia, however, were valued for contrasting reasons, just as in many areas of ancient America the scent of copper-gold alloy was a metal's most valued aspect, one that few Europeans might appreciate. Falchetti thus reminds the reader that while one may seek to understand behaviors and values through cross-cultural comparison and long-term, widespread general patterns, one must remain sensitive to differences even within generally similar cultural spheres. Eugenia Ibarra mines ethnohistoric sources for great riches, providing the f irst detailed account of the points of origin for some of the gold objects taken by the Spanish in southern Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Ibarra notes the terminology used by the Spanish for different gold objects as well as their perceptions of different qualities of gold, for example, buen oro and oro bajo. The latter stands in marked contrast to the subtle appreciation of the transformative qualities of copper-gold alloy by the native peoples. Ibarra also raises the issue of who was entitled to wear gold ornaments, one of the recurring issues in this volume, and offers avenues for future investigation of this matter. This issue, in turn, is but one aspect of the larger question of the nature and variability of systems of social rank in the Intermediate Area, with indications that in some places the Spanish report what appear to be "all chiefs and no Indians," as it were. Ibarra also offers a theoretical perspective on how gold and other 8 Jeffrey Quilter (Cooke et al. 2000) at Cerro Juan Díaz, where preservation was fairly good, are thus all the more important for the osteological information they will be able to retrieve in future studies. Another factor related to determining social organization and expressions of political power is the ability to conduct excavations of large areas. Although few sites in the central Intermediate Area have the kind of vertical monumentality of a Tikal or Machu Picchu, many are quite extensive horizontally. The work conducted by If igenia Quintanilla in the lower Diquís Delta is impressive in that, on a very small budget, she was able to document not only the great size of individual sites but also to show the extensive and expansive nature of site complexes throughout the area. Finally, the investigation of symbol systems offers...

The Arts of the Ancient Americas at the Dallas Museum of Art, 2023

This essay revisits the history and dissemination of the art of metallurgy in the ancient Americas through a extensive process of intercultural exchange that extended over vast territories from the South American highlands to the periphery of the Caribbean Basin during the first millennium CE. The stylistic similarities between gold ornaments found namely in Colombia and Central Panama from the collection holdings of the Dallas Museum of Art will serve as documental evidence of the existence of a pan-regional cosmology associated to the military theocracies that ruled the land. This category of ornaments with its own repertory of icons and themes co-existed with the distinctive regional styles of ornamentation such as nose rings that has helped modern scholars differentiate one culture from another. This research focuses on the commonalities in the metallurgic production associated to kingship throughout the Isthmo-Colombian Area, studying them from a broader geo-cultural perspective.

Anuário Antropológico, 2023

Relationships among the peasants and the lagoons in rural communities situated in the northern Andes in Peru are ambiguous. The lagoons, located at the top of the mountains, appear as ferocious entities in the stories of local people. However, when these waters were threatened by a mining project, the peasants defended these lagoons with their own lives. This work aims to analyse narratives concerning the metamorphosis of humans when they are seduced by these lagoons. The paper is based on ethnographic research conducted between 3 and 4 in the village of El Tambo, in the district of Bambamarca, Hualgayoc Province, and the town of Celendín, Celendín Province. Both localities are within the region of Cajamarca in the Peruvian Andes. Besides this period of research, new reports and testimonies were collected in both localities during short visits between 2016 and 2020. Certain categories, like wild/tame, sweet/savoury, voracious/self-controlled, are essential to the analysis in order to understand the relationship between the seduction of the beings that inhabit the lagoons and the repudiation of the voracity of open-pit mining

2023

This paper proposes to read Michael Taussig’s My Cocaine Museum (2004) as a forerunner of recent research on the Latin American extractive zone (Gómez- Barris). In his remarkable book, the Australian anthropologist writes on the relation between two prime materials that have an important impact on the past and present of Colombia: gold and cocaine. Focusing on a region close to the Pacific Coast, more specifically the gold-mining village of Santa María, Taussig’s creative work of nonfiction explores the fact that multiple forms of violence (ecological, colonial, extractivist, political) converge in the Timbiquí region. It also makes an innovative move by including cocaine within the discussion on capitalist extractivism. Returning to Taussig’s book is also productive at this stage because it offers a theoretical and artistic starting point for thinking through the social ecologies and the resistance encountered in the extractive region of the Colombian South-West Pacific. Ultimately, this paper argues, My Cocaine Museum constitutes an example of anti-extractivist non-fiction, as it uses montage techniques to create shock, wonder, and hope, to establish unexpected connections between the past and the present, and to revitalise both the Timbiquí region and the official Colombian Gold Museum.

I combine fieldwork photography and ethnographic documentation of gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru, to examine the localized material, social, environmental, and health outcomes of the global gold boom. This 'theoretical photo essay’ examines how local and global forces coalesce around gold mining and influence peoples and environments in Western Amazonia. I use embodiment theory in anthropology, ecological economics, and theories of underdevelopment to understand local consequences of the global gold trade and to elucidate how opulence and the machinations of capital accumulation in economic centers of the world occur at the expense of human lives and environments in the hinterlands. Building on this analysis, I draw upon the Marxian concepts of mystification and fetishization to show how the rationale and language invoked in discourses about the gold boom in Madre de Dios work to obscure interconnections between the devastating local consequences of the global gold trade and the unequal economic global system of exchange that unevenly distributes profits and risks.

In 2001, the local afrodescendant community from La Toma faced a double threat. First, new mining legislation was introduced and their ancestral mining activities were declared illegal. Second, paramilitary groups entered the territory and initiated a regime of terror that continues to date. Mining titles were conceded to multinationals and private parties, while the communities were restricted in their access to land-based resources. This paper deals with different dimensions of local dispossession resulting from violent mechanisms as well as from the neoliberal adjustment of the mining regulatory system in Colombia.

From Extractivism to Sustainability, 2023

This chapter analyses the dynamics of extractivism as it pertains to water, land and gold, from the theoretical perspective of socio-cultural studies. Within the framework of the geoeconomics and geopolitics of capital, it presents a current overview of three examples of the extractivist model that exists in Colombia (large and ‗small‘ hydroelectrical plants, agricultural monoculture and forest plantations and mega-mining) endorsed as the driver of development and key source of funding for work towards peace and for the economic recovery from the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic. In this context, the article also examines the principal strategies, social agents and class divisions that make up the social arena of 21st-century extractivism in the country and, in turn, embodies the discursive disputes and the work of development with respect to the agency of the private sector, the role of the State and the actions of social movements.

Gold and power in ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and …, 2003

Gold in the Everyday Lives of Indigenous Peoples of Sixteenth-Century Southern Central America Eugenia Ibarra (1563)(Juan Vazquez de Coronado)" as best he could, received said presents [gold pieces], giving in trade a great amount of axes, glass beads, and other things; which ...