Dreams of Gold: Mesoamerican Metalwork and the Question of Form

Abstract The fact that some of the earliest gold objects of Mesoamerican manufacture exhibit formal similarities to adornments originating further to the south, in what is now Costa Rica and Panama, reflects the original transmission of both the metal and the knowledge of how to work it from Lower Central America to Mesoamerica. Rather than resulting from passive retention or imitation, this essay argues that the decisions of early Maya and Mixtec goldworkers reflect a widespread Mesoamerican conception of materials as being inextricably bound up with their histories and social relations, associations that were understood to persist — and even to inhere — within the material, and which were sometimes expressed through the forms that were given to it.