The luminous and tinkling effects of gold for pre-Hispanic cultures of Colombia
If someone wants to understand a new country, its history and culture I recommend visiting an art museum. Art shows people’s triumphs, fears and great regrets regarding significant from locals' perspective events in history.
In contrast, History museums while narrating country's story, often follow the same structure across very different cultures and thus I find them often failing to deliver a unique story of a particular place; historians enforce rules and vocabulary which do not always help to depict but rather label.
1.While traveling around South East Asia and Latin America I realized that in these parts of the world my suggestion to rather visit an art museum to learn about a new country and its history doesn’t work either.
Asian and Latin American art museums heavily showcase artworks that correspond in some ways to the European art. Often this art is even conducted or taught by Europeans. They try to show an analogy of the renaissance or impressionism while hiding an actual art that depicts exciting and thrilling moments of their history in archeological, anthropological, separate artists galleries and all kinds of other museums and places.
The Gold Museum of Bogota
This whole long préambule is to highlight how much I got impressed to discover the Gold Museum of Bogota. I have been to several art and history museums in Medellin, Bogota and some smaller towns but this particular Gold Museum opened my eyes to the Colombian history and foundation of its culture that is based on pre-Hispanic people.
2. The Gold Museum of Bogota has the largest collection of gold artifacts in the world. There is no entrance fee collected and there are lots of people offering free tours at the entrance of the museum. I strongly suggest going for it. The deal is that you can pay as much as you evaluate your guide at the end of his tour but nothing in advance.
I was confused and overwhelmed by such offers and went there myself — I must say that I regret that decision. The tours were interesting and conducted in a competent manière. I was able to overhear some guides and parts of their stories but I did not feel comfortable joining them as I did not agree upon that in advance and they were already with clients when inside the building. The guides know the history well and are witty — I strongly suggest getting one before entering the museum, you will crave to hear some stories behind these beautiful golden objects on the shelves of the museum.
Gold is the central topic for the Colombian in particular and Latin American in general pre-Hispanic cultures. Digging metal, transforming, combining it with different materials, shaping, trading, wearing, using in rituals and so much more. Gold was a part of everyone’s everyday life although in a different way than we expect.
3.Gold was not important as a currency, it had a symbolic relation to the Sun. And it was not gold itself that had such an important meaning but its qualities as a metal, in particular, the shining and illuminating, tinkling and jingling effects. These effects along with the effect of chewing coca in rituals were helping to establish a connection to “the other world” and gods.
For indigenous people, it was never about how much gold an object contained. Given a choice to select one, their preferences would be solely based on the meanings and purposes of the objects and not on how many grams of gold is inside. It is special to see a different way and reasons to value gold.
A sacred philosophy associated with shine gave meaning to glossy cultural objects and to luminous phenomena in nature. It led to a particular form of aesthetics by favouring certain materials and finishes.
Back in the university times, I learned a surprising detail about values from a French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. In the 40s he carried out research among the Amazonas tribes (mostly in Brazil). He discovered that for them richness was in complex and intriguing family legends and had nothing to do with the material world. The more interesting stories (myths) you have to tell, the richer you are. Storytelling is nearly a must-have skill nowadays — for these indigenous people, it was a holy grail of success they dreamt of for thousands of years. Seeing a different value in gold was just as special to learn about as valuing storytelling higher than anything material that I earlier learned from Lévi-Strauss.
The picture above is featuring an attempt to figure out how that object was created. Sometimes there were fingerprints found on the surfaces of the gold object that were left while the metal was still warm and soft. The latter made the first Europeans on the continent believe that locals were able to work over hot metal directly with their hands.
Later it was proven they simply used wax forms and the fingerprints left on wax got reprinted on metal :) It was that simple!
The pre-Hispanic cultures of Latin America demonstrate the highest for their time variety of complex technics and methods to mold and model gold. Practitioners of gold and metals were highly trusted among their fellows. Many of them thus served as religious or political leaders as well as carried out functions of judges in pre-Hispanic societies.
4. The famous El Dorado legend that everyone heard of since school takes its roots from a myth of a Muisca* ruler who covered himself in gold dust and dived from a raft into Lake Guatavita near Bogota. Several times in the 16th century Europeans lowered that lake and indeed found hundreds of pieces of gold. That made them believe that the El Dorado myth about a city full of precious jewels and gold had a real background and they just needed to find where it was hidden. The city has never been discovered but till these days there are explorers from time to time putting expeditions into the Amazonas jungle trying to find the hidden city, still believing the legend should be rutted in something material.
5. *Muisca and Tayrona are new words I brought from my trip to Colombia. Earlier I heard about Aztecs, Mayas, Incas and “others”. This journey to Latin America allowed me to unfold the pack of “others”, now I can lively imagine and describe: Muiscas (Bogota region) and Tayrona people (Santa Marta region).
I found a documentary recently, unfortunately after my return from Colombia that describes in great detail these two ethnic groups, how they were connected through trade and how for both of them gold was the most valuable material because of using it for sacred purposes.
Although gold played a crucial role in Muiscas day to day life there is no gold mining around the place they lived. Not far away from Bogota, there is a cathedral having a massive cave full of salt that is suggested to visit — just to show the scale of salt mining and the importance of this product.
Historians believe Muiscas were getting gold from Tayrona people in exchange for salt. Tayrona’s trade route went through the Magdalena River and its channels down to what is Bogota and further, and although it's a dangerous route through jungles, gold and salt were seen as that precious that they motivated people to overcome their fears.
6. The tremendous amount of gold and sophisticated gold objects that were found in what is called Colombia today reveals a vibrant history behind these treasures and the cultures which developed them. Nothing other than gold presents livelier a history of pre-Hispanic cultures.
7. There is a network of Gold Museums all across the country, not just in Bogota but in Cartagena, Santa Marta, Cali, Manizales and other big and small towns. Even if you aren’t interested in gold as I used to be, take gold museums into account while visiting Colombia ☺ For me personally, Santa Marta’s Gold museum is the must-visit place on my next trip to this beautiful country.
You will leave a gold museum not just having some beautiful objects in your mind but having an understanding of how the cultures behind these objects were functioning.
New discoveries in the Colombian rainforest region deep in Amazonas
Serrania de La Lindosa
San José del Guaviare, Guaviare, Kolumbien
https://goo.gl/maps/k6Y6EHjtwFbxJfmN9
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest
Most of my time in Colombia I spent in a very special city — Medellin
Medellin got known worldwide due to a rather unfortunate figure — Pablo Escobar, its fellow citizen who arranged drug trading on an unprecedented scale. Being there 25 years after he got killed and his narco business sink turned into a special experience for me:
