Pectoral (Chest Plaque) (400–900): Art, History and Details

Pectoral (Chest Plaque) (400–900) 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 and seven other ornaments from several burials at Sitio Conte, a cemetery famous for its lavish graves of powerful chieftains. The young man buried in Grave 26 was such a chief. His status was stunningly memorialized by 21 human companions and 475 objects, many of them personal ornaments made of gold, including a large chest plaque and a rod-shaped ear ornament. The creature on the chest plaque, found close to the chief’s body, has reptile claws and perhaps the head crest of an iguana. Its meaning is unknown but perhaps, as in later periods, reptilian imagery and the warm gleam of gold linked rulers with the sun’s creative force.

Object facts

• Title: Pectoral (Chest Plaque)
• Date: 400–900
• Culture: Intermediate Region, Panama, Conte style, 5th-10th Century
• Type: Metalwork
• Technique: gold alloy
• Dimensions: Overall: 25.1 x 26.7 cm (9 7/8 x 10 1/2 in.)
• Collection: AA - Intermediate Region
• Department: Art of the Americas
• Accession number: 1952.459

A detail from the museum

Panning for gold was viewed as a sacred activity among the ancient inhabitants of Costa Rica and Panama.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. R. Henry Norweb, Mrs. Albert S. Ingalls, with additions from the John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Cocle, Vol. 7.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.

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.