Sort of a follow up question: I’ve been told that explorers to the new world often lied about finding gold as to fund future expeditions. Is this true?

EDIT: In my response I mentioned that I wanted to go back to the literature and dig out more - it turns out /u/savageson79 is an archaeologist in the region and provided a much more direct answer to the question than I did. Please give it a read!

So this is a fantastic question, and I'd like to begin by saying I'm going to follow up on my answer later today. As you might expect, I'm a PhD student in the throes of arranging qualifying exam reading lists - because of this, I have a few books set to pick up later today that may give some answers to this question! But instead of working on my reading lists I'm going to procrastinate with you a little this morning. Don't feel too special, I do it more often than I'd like to admit.

Metallurgy was developed in this part of the world in southern Colombia/northern Ecuador, up in the highlands. One of these early goldworking cultures, the La Tolita, had its start along the coast perhaps in the 5th century BC or so, and traded extensively with their highland friends to make remarkable pieces. As Heather Lechtman (1984) discusses, metallurgy was developed in the Andes for the purposes of establishing and enriching spiritual and political power in hierarchical societies. The colors of gold and silver symbolized the sweat of the Sun and the tears of the Moon - they were numinous with supernatural energy. This stands in contrast to European proto-capitalist societies at Contact, who were interested in gold as a commodity for economic valuation. In any case, these techniques of alloying gold with copper - tumbaga - spread from its Colombian source, likely through La Tolita traders, as far as West Mexico, and to the north coast of Peru where the Moche and Lambayeque produced stunning examples. This trade was enabled by various communities of merchants and traders, as folks like Jorge Marcos (1986) have suggested. Colonial accounts of raft traders have been attributed to the Manteño señorios of the southern Ecuadorian coast, and Marcos argues that there was an ancient and extensive trade network (that he calls the Abya Yala) that traded various commodities - ceramics, Spondylus, metallurgy, salt, lapis lazuli, and so on. The Manteño in this reckoning would have been only the last in a long sequence of mercantile communities that helped interlink the Pacific communities of prehistoric South and Central America. To some extent, the answer to your question is, "they traded for it", and this is a likely if partial answer.

Lange and Accola's (1979) work in the Bay of Culebra region (near the border of Nicaragua) encountered late-period copper bells in burial contexts; in the article I cite they actually discuss the paucity of recovered gold relative to the initial Conquest accounts you mention. Sam Lothrop, an early archaeologist of the Americas, posited that the abundance of gold came in from trade from Nicaraguan workshops, or others further afield, since folks weren't finding much in the region. However, the presence of metallurgy in relatively small-scale burials led Lange and Accola to posit there were more local production centers in Costa Rica. [This is what I will return to later today - this is an almost forty year old excavation, and I'm going to try and hunt down some more recent sources, especially to see if Costa Rican metallurigical workshops have been encountered in the archaeological record. Fingers crossed!]

We also need to keep in mind that a lot of goldwork from this region has been melted down in the intervening five hundred years. The fact we don't find a lot of gold is partly because the Spanish were very thorough in tracking down gold by looting and forcing Native American groups to mine out mountains of it for them. This has continued to the present day, where gold and silver metalworks of these pre-Hispanic cultures are just as likely to be melted down for the material as they are to be sold into black markets. Very, very few of them are recovered archaeologically - and it can be a death knell for an excavation, as it brings in a lot more trouble than most projects are able to handle (looting, robbery, bribes, etc.). One of the worst offenders was on the island of La Tolita (the type-site of the culture I mentioned earlier). The island was considered wak'a, a sacred space where centuries' worth of goldwork was carefully deposited. A wealthy businessman was somehow able to acquire the land, and he razed the entire surface of the island to mine out the gold. He wasn't even interested in the artifacts, except for their commodified value. This is hopefully beginning to indicate the scale and the depth of the problem archaeologists in this region face.

To wrap up, I'd like to say that if people have follow-up questions, I am happy to answer them slowly but surely over the course of the day. I will expand my answer later today with new information I find as well. There's not many chances Latin American history and archaeology is a hot topic in /r/AskHistorians, so I'm happy to be a resource for people who are curious!

References Cited:

Lange, Frederick W., and Richard M. Accola. 1979. Metallurgy in Costa Rica. Archaeology 32(5): 26-33.

Lechtman, Heather. 1984. Andean Value Systems and the Development of Prehistoric Metallurgy. Technology and Culture 25(1): 1-36.

Marcos Pino, Jorge. 1986. Breve prehistoria del Ecuador. In Arqueología de la Costa Ecuatoriana: Nuevos Enfoques, edited by Jorge Marcos Pino, pp. 25–50. Corporación Editora Nacional, Quito, Ecuador.

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Hi all, I am an archaeologist who works in Costa Rica and Panama, and who specializes in the Pre-Columbian period until Spanish contact. Forgive my rambling response, I have a little time between classes and I will borrow bits from one of my pubs. Looters have plundered most burial sites in Costa Rica and elsewhere, and this complicates our understanding of the political economy and trade dynamics involving goldwork. But a casual stroll through the Gold museums in Costa Rica and Colombia will indicate that there was once lots goldwork used by pre-Columbian societies. I will reference Panama and Colombia in my responses because they were probably interrelated to some degree. With respect to gold (really what we call tumbaga, a gold and coppor alloy), the archaeologist Warwick Bray once wrote, ““From the early centuries A.D., until about 900, the vast region from central Colombia to northern Costa Rica (a straight-line distance of about 800 miles) was one metallurgical province” (1992: 39). While there are some regional differences country to country, the similarities stand out very strongly and this has suggested to some that these items were traded widely. Others disagree, and I will describe that too.

Within Costa Rica, the Panteon de la Reina (Quiler 2004) was well-known as a pre-Columbian cemetery with lots of gold ornaments. This was looted early on in the historic era. The Osa Peninsula (southern Costa Rica) still has gold-bearing rivers that people pan today, though the archaeology of that region is not well understood. Just across the border in Panama, early sources describe the Huacal de Bugaba cemetery (precise location unknown today) and the Chiriquí plains as have lots of graves which contained gold. There was a brief gold rush that drew American fortune seekers to the Chiriquí plains (see MacCurdy 1911), summarized in the popular magazine Harper’s Weekly during the late 19th century. More popular newspapers from the describe other gold-rich areas in western Panama. These descriptions conservatively indicate that many thousands of tombs were opened, and staggering amounts of gold ornaments were looted and exported. Holmberg (2010) estimated over 10 million dollars’ worth of Chiriquí gold artifacts were melted annually by the Bank of England, a figure she acknowledges is underestimated because it does not include unreported items. In central Panama, in the sites of Sitio Conte and El Caño, we find sets of very “rich” tombs containing oodles of goldwork. The recent work on the latter was featured not too long ago in a Spanish-languge version of National Geographic, the cover page reading “El Dorado de Panamá” (or the golden man of Panama). We have data from over 100 professionally excavated graves from this part of Panama (dating from roughly 750 to 1522 AD), and about 50% of them contain at least one gold ornament (Briggs 1989). I don’t have time to go into every site, but I think it is fair to say that the archaeology confirms lots of gold once upon a time. We archaeologists tend to worry about how it traveled, how accessible to it was to different social groups, and how it mattered to social change more generally. The early Europeans noted lots of gold as well. Colombus’ fourth voyage to Veraguas (Panama) described how many of the native inhabitants wore ornaments of gold. He wrote that, “I saw more signs of gold in the first two days than I saw in Española during four years” (Brittian and Reed 1903: 270). The observation of chief Parita’s funeral by Gaspar de Espinosa (Jopling 1994; Lothrop 1937) also provides information on how much gold was in circulation at the time of Contact. Lothrop’s (1950) Archaeology of Southern Veraguas is a rich resource for more descriptions. A seminal resource on this subject is Mary Helms (1979). She emphasized how long-distance associations with more complex Colombian chiefdoms and access to their powerful symbols were important components of Panamanian political economies. She felt that goldwork was manufactured in Colombia and then traded to various Isthmian “hinterland chiefs” (Helms 1979: 35). She believed the directionality of this trade was asymmetrical, as obvious Panamanian trade items are largely absent in Colombia.

This view has its proponents and detractors, but it is no longer a consensus view. I would refer you to Cooke et al. (2003) for more detail. Helms’ scenario assumed that isthmus lacked both sufficient mineral resources and skilled artisans. Neither is accurate. Gold deposits existed in many parts of Costa Rica and Panama and that these sources were occasionally quite rich (e.g. Fernández 1882; Jopling 1994). The identities of Pre-Columbian goldsmiths in these regions are poorly known. Ethnohistoric suggest that anyone from chiefs themselves (Ibarra 2003), to itinerant smiths (Willey 1984), to large groups of “a hundred men who continuously worked gold” (Jopling 1994:23) were responsible for the production of ornaments. The Spanish discovered even greater quantities of goldwork (and silver) in Peru and Bolivia shortly after their forays in Costa Rica and Panama, and their attention quickly shifted to the south.

References: Bray, Warwick 1992 Sitio Conte Metalwork in its Pan-American Context. In Rivers of Gold: Precolumbian Treasures from Sitio Conte, edited by Pamela Hearne and Robert J. Sharer, pp. 33-46. University Museum of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Briggs, Peter 1989 Art, Death and Social Order: The Mortuary Arts of Pre-Conquest Central Panama. BAR International Series 550, Oxford.

Brittain, Alfred, and George Edward Reed 1903 The History of North America: Discovery and Exploration, volume 1. George Barrie and Sons, Philadelphia.

Cooke, Richard, Ilean Isaza, John Griggs, Benoit Desjardins, and Luís Alberto Sánchez 2003 Who Crafted, Exchanged, and Displayed Gold in Pre-Columbian Panama? In Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and John W. Hoopes, pp. 91-158. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C.

Fernández B, León 1882 Colleción de documentos para la historia de Costa Rica, volumen 2. Imprenta Nacional, San José.

Helms, Mary 1979 Ancient Panama: Chiefs in Search of Power. University of Texas Press, Austin.

Holmberg, Karen 2010 Placing Immateriality: Situating the Material of Highland Chiriquí. Internet Archaeology 28.

Ibarra Rojas, Eugenia 1990 Las sociedades cacicales de Costa Rica (siglo XVI). Editorial Universidad de Costa Rica, San José. 2003 Gold in the Everyday Lives of Indigenous Peoples of Sixteenth-Century Southern Central America. In Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and John W. Hoopes, pp. 383-419. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C.

Jopling, Carol F. 1994 Indios y negros en Panamá en los siglos XVI y XVII: Seleciones de los documentos del Archivo General de Indias. Plumsock Mesoamerican Studies, South Woodstock.

Lothrop, Samuel 1937 Coclé: An Archaeological Study of Central Panama, Part 1. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Memoir 7, Cambridge. 1950 The Archaeology of Southern Veraguas, Panama. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University Memoir 13, Cambridge.

MacCurdy, George 1911 A Study of Chiriquian Antiquities. Memoirs of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 3. New Haven.

Quilter, Jeffrey 2004 Cobble Circles and Standing Stones: Archaeology at the Rivas Site, Costa Rica. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

Willey, Gordon 1984 A Summary of the Archaeology of Lower Central America. In The Archaeology of Lower Central America, edited by Frederick W. Lange and Doris Z. Stone, pp. 339-378. School of America Research and the University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.