Ornament from Sitio Conte: Small Plaque (c. 400–500): Art, History and Details

Ornament from Sitio Conte: Small Plaque (c. 400–500) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Harvard archaeologists excavated this ornament from Grave 32 at Sitio Conte, a cemetery famous for its lavish graves of powerful chieftains. The warm gleam of gold linked rulers with the sun’s creative force.

Object facts

• Title: Ornament from Sitio Conte: Small Plaque
• Date: c. 400–500
• Culture: Panama, Conte style, 5th - 10th century
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: hammered gold
• Dimensions: Overall: 9.3 x 10 cm (3 11/16 x 3 15/16 in.)
• Collection: AA - Intermediate Region
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1951.155

A detail from the museum

This disk was excavated from a burial containing three bodies.

Collection credit

The Norweb Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lothrop, S. K. "Archaeology of Southern Veraguas, Panama" Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. 9:3 (1950)
• Bennett, Wendell C. Ancient Arts of the Andes. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.
• Couch, N. C. Christopher, Joanna Eckman, Daniel Jussim, and Jacquelyn Hamm Southern. Faces of Eternity Masks of the Pre-Columbian Americas [Anläßlich Der Ausstellung Vom 19. September - 15. Dezember, 1991 in Americas Society. Dalton: Studley Pr, 1991.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.