To Capture the Sun

"Metallurgy in gold developed into a high art form in the Gran Coclé during the centuries leading up to European contact. For indigeous people of the Americas, gold was not primarily an expression of social position or an index to commercial wealth but a luminous token of the relationship between the human and metaphysical worlds. Europeans desired the shiny metal as a route to power and riches. In the rush to acquire gold for its monetary value, they confiscated untold numbers of culturally meaningful and artfully wrought gold objects and melted them into ingots for shipment to Europe. Today only a small fraction survives of the vast stores of metallurgical artifacts encountered by the first Europeans who reached the western hemisphere. In the 1940s, Thomas Gilcrease acquired a significant collection of gold artifacts and related zoomorphic ceramic and other items from the Gran Coclé.... For Gilcrease, these objects symbolized the height of cultural achievement in the Americas before European contact"--Book jacket front flap. "To Capture the Sun: Gold of Ancient Panama explores Gilcrease Museum's unique holding of pre-Columbian gold and related ritual ceramics in the largest displ