Went to see the pre-Inca exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum over Easter. A Japanese archaeologist from an American university spends 25 years investigating a previously unknown pre-Inca civilization, about a thousand years gone now, that he calls the "Sican." All his major finds come from very deep excavations that go below what the looters cleaned out. Important stuff, well worth showing the world.
The Sican are another early civilizations with agricultural bounty used to support a godlike ruling caste. The principal excavation behind this exhibit is one tomb that was much laden with grave goods. Gold was the tribute the society paid to its rulers. (Bronze, too, actually, and there was lots of fine weaving, mostly now eroded away, and much else). The gold was mostly not the heavy metal form; they liked to hammer gold into paper thin sheets and then work it into amazing forms. Impressive.
It's a travelling exhibit, so probably the exhibit design and the captioning are not the ROM's. But once again, how disappointing it is see a high-profile museum exhibit that gives us first-rate artifacts with such mediocre interpretive materials.
The captions dump barely understandable technical detail on us, and they skimp on answers to the obvious questions any reader wants to have answered. They are consistently badly written, ignoring basic good-writing rules. Why can't museum curators write? Why won't they think like visitors?
