Golden Kingdoms: Luxury Arts in the Ancient Americas serves as the catalog to accompany a major exhibition of ancient American elite objects from the late second millennium BC to the arrival of the Europeans, and from the Andean region in the south to Mesoamerica in the north, with all areas in between. The catalog is divided into two roughly equal sections: 1) A set of 12 narrative chapters that treat different regions and their histories; 2) A catalog of the exhibition with extensive, well-documented entries for each of 229 objects. The exhibition was undertaken with the help of most major institutions in the origin countries, so that recent archaeological data and even recently excavated objects are incorporated throughout.
The title highlights gold as the central luxury or prestige material, but the story told here is more complex. The text highlights the relationship of gold with other precious materials (especially feathers, shell, jade, and turquoise), which were combined in distinct permutations to form luxury object systems that transformed over time and across ancient American space. Mapping the changes in luxury systems on a grand American scale is one of the more important contributions of this ambitious catalog.
The move of gold from south to north, from the Andean region in the second millennium BC to Mesoamerica after AD 600, forms one important regional and chronological backbone of the catalog, as elegantly summarized in the introduction by Joanne Pillsbury and carried through in the essays by Blanca Maldonado (Early Andean and general metallurgical techniques), Luis Jaime Castillo (Moche), Pillsbury (Andean Empires), María Alicia Uribe Villegas and Marcos Martinón Torres (Colombia), and John Hoopes (Isthmo-Colombian).
An attention to the indigenous experience of these objects is maintained throughout the narrative and especially in the catalog section. The intimate scale of most luxury objects encouraged the indigenous viewer's close relationship with artistry, which the authors regularly and effectively highlight in the catalog text. The modern reader greatly benefits from this attention to visual and even tactile experience.
The essay by Hoopes on the Isthmo-Colombian region serves as a linchpin of the luxury materials narrative. In the north of this region (Costa Rica), the two great luxury materials, jade from the north and gold from the south, meet in the latter half of the first millennium AD. Importantly, the local history of jade working is well described before the author turns to the transition to gold as chief luxury material in the eighth century AD, thus giving a more grounded local context for the momentous shift.
Following the Isthmo-Colombian essay, the narrative turns to jade and its central importance in Mesoamerica. For this, the text must return to the late second millennium BC and the Olmec practice of jade and greenstone celt deposition in sacred springs. The blue/green color of these jades and other greenstones was related to fresh growth, water, and fecundity in this region from this point forward. Laura Filloy Nadal gives a superb synthesis of jade's central place in the region, wielding a large amount of technical data on the nature and source of the material developed over several innovative projects launched by Mexico's national archaeological research institute.
Stephen Houston's essay plumbs Classic Maya thinking on the nature and value of jade and other luxury materials. The author points out that luxury objects were directly associated with the resplendent elite body. Luxury objects set apart the elite body from the common and linked it to forces coaxed from the rare material. Heirloom jewels once worn by important ancestors, real or imagined, were especially prized.
The exhibition makes clear that jade and gold are critical to understanding luxury object systems, but they never exist in isolation. Adrián Velázquez Castro describes the sources and fabrication processes of high-value shell. The author suggests that the extinction of valuable Spondylus types from the coast of Ecuador and Peru led to trading farther north and eventually to contact with Western Mexico, where valuable shells were more plentiful.
Kim Richter delineates a rich context for the fabrication and circulation of luxury objects in Postclassic Mesoamerica. She draws on extensive post-conquest records, and especially the Codex Mendoza, to paint a rich picture of tributary sources, material movements, and fabrication locations for the panoply of luxury items that flowed into the imperial Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. These rich luxury object ensembles sated the elite's desire for shimmering brilliant optical effects that were so central to indigenous aesthetics.
Of the explorations of gold and its relation to other luxury goods, the essay by Leonardo López Luján and José Ruvalcaba Sil on Mexica gold is particularly illuminating in its wealth of data and its careful delineation of archaeological context. The authors argue persuasively that the amount of gold controlled by the Mexica (Aztec) was relatively small, especially when compared with the Andean tradition, and that goldwork was intimately embedded in the larger luxury object system focused more on jade and feathers. Through a careful comparative analysis of the relative amounts of additional metal (copper and silver) contained in the gold found in the Templo Mayor and elsewhere in Mesoamerica, the authors are able to hypothesize a heretofore unknown Basin of Mexico school of metalworking. As in Filloy Nadal's work on Mesoamerican jade, and Maldonado's scene-setting chapter on metallurgical techniques, among others, this chapter benefits from long-term, careful archaeological documentation and advanced technical analysis of these objects, rendering possible historical and cultural insights that would be very difficult to produce without such documentation.
In the final narrative chapter, Julia McHugh describes the globalization of trade in luxury goods beginning in the sixteenth century, where the new religion and luxury trade intertwined, making the display of gold and silver central to colonial luxury. A telling surprise is the inclusion of a sixteenth-century feather painting of Christian subject matter, proving the central importance of the show's thesis: the history of elite materials and goods may be productively examined over the longue durée and even across what seem like impermeable cultural and historical boundaries.
