El Dorado

Sunday afternoon, and I decided, after a lazy lunch, that I would visit the new exhibition at the British Museum.

There are in fact two special exhibitions on at the moment, but the one I wanted to see was on Columbia before the Spanish conquest, and the place of gold in their society.

It was quite a fascinating exhibition.   Most of the items could not be dated accurately, and were listed as somewhere between 200 bc and 1600 AD, but what struck me was the similarity between the gold jewellery of pre-Spanish conquest Columbia and that of Europe and Central Asia.   It was as if the people from all thsoe areas had been in contact with each other, although history tells otherwise, at least in the case of South America.   Even the methods of production were similar.   So a question arises - how did people so far apart come up with the same ideas for creating beautiful gold jewellery.   And why did they all choose gold?

The exhibition was much smaller than many of the previous exhibitions I have been to there - an hour and a half was plenty to see it all - but it was still worth going to see.