MAGAmerica's New "Panama Crisis" and Archaeology

Panama, two seas away from MAGAmerica

   Frog from Venado Beach in a US museum       

In a meeting yesterday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly issued an ultimatum to Panama’s president José Raúl Mulino over the Panama Canal. Reportedly, he said that without immediate action to address what he called “Chinese influence”, the US will take “all necessary measures to protect its rights”. Does the USA government plan to invade Panama? (see Trump dreams of empire expansion). 

If they do, no doubt there will be more looting of the archaeological sites of the area, it's worth noting a rather disturbing series of field projects by US archaeologists in the region from the end of the 1940s and 1950s onwards that dug up lots of stuff (some of which ended up "somehow" in US museums) but were rarely properly published. Some ended up as grey literature in the form of students' theses in US university archives, some were publicised by breathless-discovery (and gold) themed articles in magazines like National Geographic, but where are the monographs? And where are the full site reports in the local language - which is Spanish and not US English?  

An example of this is the ("Cocle Culture" [?]) site at Venado Beach, an unpublished site "discovered by the U.S. Navy in 1948 while bulldozing off the topsoil in order to enrich the lawns of the 15th Naval District". The subsequent excavation is rather poorly recorded, with the finds dispersed - some of them having been dug up by US servicemen stationed at Fort Kobbe. There are a number of items in US collections that were "gifts of" (ie come from the antiquities market), for example of the "Veraguas-Chiriquí Region/ culture" (Panama and Costa Rica, 500 - 1000AD) in Birmingham Alabama,  a pendant in Brooklyn, a frog pendant in the NY Met. and so on.  Maybe it is time to decolonise these museum collections.

           Cocle bowl, Panama              

Then we have US dealers openly selling stuff from the still poorly understood  [Gran] Coclé culture - exemplified by this 'tribal art' page from a Chicago dealer about the delights of Coclé culture  pottery. This San Francisco  dealer offers a polychrome fruitera pedestal dish 600-800 AD for $2,500 ("Ex. private collection, Cedar Rapids, IA"), a Hollywood CA seller who has what they assert is a "Large Ancient Pre Columbian Cocle Culture Hand Painted Vessel Jar Pottery with COA" for US $1,250. Then there is Bob Darge (Artemis)'s "Gran Cocle Polychrome Footed Plate w/ Crocodilians ca. 500 to 1200 CE. ("Mineral and earthen deposits on the underside and foot, and manganese deposits throughout. Provenance: ex-private USA collection acquired before 2000" [so what?]). This one passed through US hands and is now up for auction in Paris - they say it is a: Cocle culture, Montijo, Panama, 700-1100 A.D. "polychrome globular olla with fantastic animals ("Provenance: Private American collection, acquired 2004, Herbert L. Lucas, Los Angeles (#246), acquired prior to 1993 Fine Arts of Ancient Lands, New York" [so what?]).

And so it goes on. 
 

References

Lothrop, S. K. (1954). "Suicide, Sacrifice and Mutilations in Burials at Venado Beach, Panama". American Antiquity. 19 (3): 226–234.

Doyle, James (2015-08-18). "Unearthing Gold Masterpieces from Venado Beach, Panama". The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Wardwell, Allen (1973). "Some New Acquisitions of Pre-Hispanic Gold". Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago. 67 (1): 16–20. doi:10.2307/4111236. ISSN 0094-3312. JSTOR 4111236.