The Museum of Gold is an archaeology museum located in Bogotá, Colombia. It is one of the most visited touristic highlights in the country. The museum receives around 500,000 tourists per year.
Pre-Columbian art refers to the visual arts of indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, North, Central, and South Americas from at least 13,000 BCE to the European conquests starting in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The pre-Columbian era continued for a time after these in many places, or had a transitional phase afterwards. Many types of perishable artifacts that were once very common, such as woven textiles, typically have not been preserved, but Precolumbian monumental sculpture, metalwork in gold, pottery, and painting on ceramics, walls, and rocks have survived more frequently.
The Archaeology Museum of Pasca is an archaeological museum located in Pasca, Colombia. It houses a great collection of Pre-Columbian objects and human remains, including Muisca mummies. It has a replica of the famous golden raft, Balsa Muisca, found near this town that represents the El Dorado rite. The museum hosts a piece of Muisca textile from Belén, Boyacá. The total collection numbers 2500 pieces. Apart from the Muisca artifacts, the museum hosts material from the Tairona, Calima, Quimbaya, Sinú, San Agustín and Tierradentro, among others.
The National Museum in New Delhi, also known as the National Museum of India, is one of the largest museums in India. Established in 1949, it holds a variety of articles ranging from the pre-historic era to modern works of art. It functions under the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. The museum is situated on Janpath. The blueprint of the National Museum had been prepared by the Gwyer Committee set up by the Government of India in 1946. The museum has around 200,000 works of art, mostly Indian, but some of foreign origin, covering over 5,000 years.
The National Museum of Colombia is the National Museum of Colombia housing collections on its history, art, culture. Located in Bogotá downtown, is the biggest and oldest museum in Colombia. The National Museum of Colombia is a dependency of the Colombian Ministry of Culture.
Malagana, also known as the Malagana Treasure is an archaeological site of Colombia named after a sugarcane estate where it was accidentally discovered in 1992. During the few days after its discovery, the place was subject to a large scale looting with a rough estimate of 4 tons of pre-Columbian artifacts illegally removed from the burial mounds. A rescue archaeological mission was sent by the National Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH), led by archaeologist Marianne Cardale de Schrimpff. Archaeological excavations at the site established a previously unknown cultural complex, designated as Malagana-Sonsoid, that dates between 300 BC to 300 AD.
The Museo Popol Vuh is home to one of the major collections of Maya art in the world. It is located on the campus of the Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Zone 10, Guatemala City. The museum is known for its extensive collection of pre-Columbian and colonial art of the Maya culture.
The Sacred Cenote is a water-filled sinkhole in limestone at the pre-Columbian Maya archaeological site of Chichen Itza, in the northern Yucatán Peninsula. It is located to the north of Chichen Itza's civic precinct, to which it is connected by a 300-metre (980 ft) sacbe, a raised pathway.
A Poporo is a device used by indigenous cultures in present and pre-Columbian South America for storage of small amounts of lime produced from burnt and crushed sea-shells. It consists of two pieces: the receptacle and the lid, which includes a pin that is used to carry the lime to the mouth while a person is chewing coca leaves. Since the chewing of coca is sacred for the indigenous people, the poporos are also believed to have mystical powers and social status.
The Larco Museum is a privately owned museum of pre-Columbian art, located in the Pueblo Libre District of Lima, Peru. The museum is housed in an 18th-century vice-royal building. It showcases chronological galleries that provide a thorough overview of 5,000 years of Peruvian pre-Columbian history. It is well known for its gallery of pre-Columbian erotic pottery.
The Quimbaya (/kɪmbaɪa/) were a small, ancient indigenous group in present-day Colombia noted for their gold work characterized by technical accuracy and detailed designs. The majority of the gold work is made in tumbaga alloy, with 30% copper, which colours the pieces.
Colombian art has 3500 years of history and covers a wide range of media and styles ranging from Spanish Baroque devotional painting to Quimbaya gold craftwork to the "lyrical americanism" of painter Alejandro Obregón (1920–1992). Perhaps the most internationally acclaimed Colombian artist is painter and sculptor Fernando Botero (1932).
Metallurgy in pre-Columbian America is the extraction, purification and alloying of metals and metal crafting by Indigenous peoples of the Americas prior to European contact in the late 15th century. Indigenous Americans had been using native metals from ancient times, with recent finds of gold artifacts in the Andean region dated to 2155–1936 BC, and North American copper finds being dated to approximately 5000 BC. The metal would have been found in nature without the need for smelting, and shaped into the desired form using hot and cold hammering without chemical alteration or alloying. To date "no one has found evidence that points to the use of melting, smelting and casting in prehistoric eastern North America."
Hardstone carving, in art history and archaeology, is the artistic carving of semi-precious stones, such as jade, rock crystal, agate, onyx, jasper, serpentinite, or carnelian, and for objects made in this way. Normally the objects are small, and the category overlaps with both jewellery and sculpture. Hardstone carving is sometimes referred to by the Italian term pietre dure; however, pietra dura is the common term used for stone inlay work, which causes some confusion.
The Capulí culture refers to an archaeological classification for a group in Pre-Columbian South America on the Andean plain in what is now northern Ecuador and southern Colombia. The Capulí preceded the Piartal and Tuza cultures in the archaeological record ranging from around 800 to 1500 CE. The Capulí culture left a strong record through its pottery. The Capulí had distinctive black on dark red pottery with rectilinear geometric designs. The anthropomorphic pottery statues of the Capulí can be striking. Women are depicted with a wrap that extends from the armpit to the ankle while men have loincloths and are often shown with an object such as a drum or animal. These figures are often called coqueros because they are depicted with wads of coca leaves in their mouths. Scholars have associated the figures with shamans and possible funerary rituals.
Michael Jay Snarskis was an American archeologist who founded the scientific study of archaeology in Costa Rica. At that time, almost all artifacts available to collectors were shorn of their provenance and historical significance by huaquero looters, whom Snarskis described as "the tomb-robbers ... who have [made] such studies more difficult."
The Muisca raft, sometimes referred to as the Golden Raft of El Dorado, is a pre-Columbian votive piece created by the Muisca, an indigenous people of Colombia in the Eastern Ranges of the Colombian Andes. The piece probably refers to the gold offering ceremony described in the legend of El Dorado, which occasionally took place at Lake Guatavita. In this ritual, the new chief (zipa), who was aboard a raft and covered with gold dust, tossed gold objects into the lake as offerings to the gods, before immersing himself into the lake. The figure was created between 1295 and 1410 AD by lost-wax casting in an alloy of gold with silver and copper. The raft was part of an offering that was placed in a cave in the municipality of Pasca. Since its discovery in 1969, the Muisca raft has become a national emblem for Colombia and has been depicted on postage stamps. The piece is exhibited at the Gold Museum in Bogotá.
Quimbaya artifacts refer to a range of primarily ceramic and gold objects surviving from the Quimbaya civilisation, one of many pre-Columbian cultures of Colombia inhabiting the Middle Cauca River valley and southern Antioquian region of modern-day Colombia. The artifacts are believed to have originated during the Classical Quimbaya period 500 BC–600 AD.
This article describes the art produced by the Muisca. The Muisca established one of the four grand civilisations of the pre-Columbian Americas on the Altiplano Cundiboyacense in present-day central Colombia. Their various forms of art have been described in detail and include pottery, textiles, body art, hieroglyphs and rock art. While their architecture was modest compared to the Inca, Aztec and Maya civilisations, the Muisca are best known for their skilled goldworking. The Museo del Oro in the Colombian capital Bogotá houses the biggest collection of golden objects in the world, from various Colombian cultures including the Muisca.
The pre-Columbian cultures of Colombia refers to the ancient cultures and civilizations of Colombia.
