Collection record · Objects & craft
Pectoral (Chest Plaque)
The collection record classifies this work as metalwork. It is dated 400–900. Recorded culture or place: Intermediate Region, Panama, Conte style, 5th-10th Century.
Explore the object recordOBJECT RECORD
A closer look at the details.
- Museum title
- Pectoral (Chest Plaque)
- Date
- 400–900
- Culture / origin
- Intermediate Region, Panama, Conte style, 5th-10th Century
- Materials and technique
- gold alloy
- Dimensions
- Overall: 25.1 x 26.7 cm (9 7/8 x 10 1/2 in.)
- Artist / maker
- Not specified by the museum
- Museum
- The Cleveland Museum of Art
- Accession number
- 1952.459
FROM THE MUSEUM
In the museum’s words
The following description is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art’s original English record.
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.
FOLLOW THE SOURCE
Text and image sources
The Cleveland Museum of Art · Gift of Mrs. R. Henry Norweb, Mrs. Albert S. Ingalls, with additions from the John L. Severance Fund · CC0
The summary is based on public collection data. Refer to the museum’s latest record for the title, date and attribution.
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