Golden ornaments and semi-precious stones fill the second-floor Dietrich Gallery at the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where the "River of Gold: Precolumbian Treasures from Sitio Conte" exhibit is now on display.
The millennia-old artifacts come from the present-day Sitio Conte province in Panama, where anthropologist John Mason headed an excavation with Penn funding in 1940.
The collection, which belongs to Penn and consists of about 150 artifacts, was first shown at the Museum in 1988.
For the past two decades, it has made rounds in some of the nation's most famed art and history museums, including Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the California Academy of Sciences.
The exhibit's public opening took place yesterday afternoon, featuring family-oriented activities: Academia, families and local students enjoyed salsa dance lessons, traditional Panamanian dance and classical guitar.
Present at the opening was archaeologist Lexi Erickson, president of the Pennsylvania Society of Goldsmiths, who gave jewelry demonstrations and was on hand to explain the ancestral Panamanians' goldsmithing techniques.
Among the opening's visitors were New Jersey residents and Museum members Mario Esenbach and Pat Sines.
"We're just fans of anthropology," said Sines of their interest in the exhibit.
"River of Gold" curator Pamela Jardine is a research associate in the American section at Penn Museum and an expert on Precolumbian artifacts, about which she has written extensively.
In a lecture on Mason's Sitio Conte excavation, Jardine discussed the societal structure of the ancestral Panamanians and introduced the zoomorphic figures that are characteristic of their goldwork.
Jardine also highlighted another side of the exhibit: the excavation's financial problems.
Behind the three-ton haul of artifacts were inadequate funding concerns that worried Mason throughout the project.
"People often think that these exhibitions fall from the heavens," remarked Jardine. "I would like to put Sitio Conte in perspective."
As successful as the excavation was, such an undertaking would no longer be possible today.
"Archaeologists don't bring artifacts back now," Jardine said, "except for analysis."
River of Gold runs through Dec. 16.
