This article was last updated on April 16, 2022
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For more than a thousand years, a cemetery on the banks of the Rio Grande de Coclé in Panama lay undisturbed, unlike most in the region, escaping the attention of gold seekers and looters. In 1927, the river flooded, setting the scene for one of the richest discoveries in the history of American archaeology.
In 1940, a Penn Museum team led by J. Alden Mason excavated at the cemetery, revealing the single largest grouping of grave goods ever unearthed in Panama—golden plaques and pendants with animal-human motifs, precious and semi-precious stones, animal bone ornaments, and literally tons of detail-rich painted ceramics.
Beneath the Surface: Life, Death, Gold and Ceramics in Ancient Panama immerses visitors in the history of the original excavation, and introduces them to the Coclé people, a complex and mysterious society that disappeared approximately 1,000 years ago and left no written language.
The centrepiece of the show is a three-tiered recreation of the cemetery’s wealthiest and most important burial site, referred to as “Burial 11”, where Mason’s team encountered the remains of at least 23 people, including the so-called “Paramount Chief”, a powerful ruler and war leader in the Coclé region. The discovery has been compared to King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Egypt.
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