Demonic (Dis)Possessions: Indigenous Gold from the Colombia-Panama Borderlands

Abstract

This dissertation takes a long view at the marginalization in archaeological models of pre-Conquest metallurgy from northern Chocó and Urabá in the Colombia-Panama borderlands. It was here, where Europeans found—in the form of body ornaments—the vast amounts of gold they had been searching for over a decade in the Antilles and where the Spanish founded the first settlement in the mainland. In light of this historical significance, and specifically, the central role that Indigenous gold body ornaments played in propelling the Spanish conquest of America and financing the creation of a militant Christian empire—the bearer of the modern global age—the marginalization in archaeological models of pre-Conquest metallurgy from the Colombia-Panama borderlands is conspicuous. In “Demonic (Dis)Possessions,” I argue that the Indigenous inhabitants of northern Chocó and Urabá and their gold body ornaments were not considered manifestations of a different or “false” worldview but evidence of the Christian Devil’s power. In this context, I posit, there was no possibility for conversion or integration, as this would have necessitated, at the very least, an acknowledgement, if not an understanding, of Indigenous culture—a sentiment rooted in an appreciation and/or disdain for Indigenous worldviews, what is, essentially, the basis of anthropological inquiry. Instead, Europeans considered the Colombia-Panama borderlands as a demonic realm that also had agency and power over them. Northern Chocó and Urabá were a realm in which the conquistadors could become greedy and violent savages (idolaters). Hence, commerce emerged as the only viable colonial force. Through commerce, Europeans established “orderly” channels of dispossessions that divested the Natives from their body ornaments—and thus political and military power—while safeguarding the conquistadors from falling prey to unbridled greed and other evil vices. Indigenous gold objects from northern Chocó and Urabá have since existed in the Western imaginary as plundered and decontextualized riches, as colonial (and nationalist) projects are necessarily premised on the discursive and material dispossession of the gold and the gold-working abilities of the Indigenous inhabitants of northern Chocó and Urabá. Indigenous gold objects from the Colombia-Panama borderlands are, in other words, mutually exclusive with archaeological models, for these models are the condensation of projects inspired and financed by the destruction of these objects and their makers, not their integration into Western colonial practices of religious conversion, empire-, and later, nation-building. The marginalization of pre-Conquest metallurgy from the Colombia-Panama borderlands reveals, then, the unique power that these objects and their makers have to exist outside of the systems that oppress them, to assert their out-of-placeness and disrupt the narrative.