UC Berkeley

In 1933, monuments from the Classic Maya site of Piedras Negras, Guatemala, were loaned to the Penn Museum for a temporary period. Twelve years later, the agreement was revisited at the request of the Guatemalan government, which sought to incorporate the monuments into its National Museum. In order for the Penn Museum to retain two monuments for longer, the two parties agreed upon a deal: a longer loan extension for two Piedras Negras monuments in exchange for a disparate assemblage of Central and South American gold pieces from the Penn Museum’s storage collections. I argue that in facilitating this agreement, archaeologists, government officials, and museum professionals layered monetary value onto disparate archaeological cultures. In trying to create a fair exchange, this valuation process also involved a balancing act, in which objects of Maya heritage were weighed against objects united only by their material: gold. I refer to this skewing of objects from Panamá, Colombia, Perú, and Ecuador as a single culture group as a constructed “cultural alloy” in which their materiality of gold afforded archaeologists the ability to gloss them into a new cultural whole that, while fictive, was perceived as greater than the sum of its parts.