In a large part of northern Colombia and Central America, languages of the Chibchan family were spoken at the time of European contact (Fig. 3). This linguistic distribution prompts the question: Is there a distinctive pan- Chibchan world-view behind an the regional diversity, and can we recognize it in the imagery of the metalwork?

Fig. 3. Distribution of languages belonging to the Chibchan family (based on Costenla 1991),

Archaeologists have always been concerned with style, most often as a tool for classification, but if we look instead at subject matter (at what ís being represented, rather than how it is depicted), a different kind of picture comes into focus. What begins to show up is a basic repertoire of shared themes throughout most of the study area. From approximately A.D. 600 (or soon afterwards) the metaiwork of Caribbean Colombia and the Isthmus has a very characteristic range of subjects, inciuding all sorts of spread-wing birds (the 'aguilas' of hispanic documents; see Cooke 1986), frogs and toads, jaguars, saurians of various kinds, human figures, and a range of chimeras made up from parts of several different creatures. These main figures often have secondary figures attached to them, or have zoomorphic appendages. North and south of our region, these images are absent or uncommon.

Since an image as basic as, say, a jaguar or a frog may mean different things in different cultures, before making comparisons we should take one further step, and move from the icons themselves to a consideration of their symbolic values. To test the idea of a pan-Chibchan belief-system, we ideally need to know the 'meanings' behind the images, and their significance to the people who wore the jewellery. For prehistoric cultures this hope is unrealistic. We still lack good data on the mythologies and non-material cultures of many of the Chibcha-speaking groups, and in practice the traditional 'look and guess' approach to interpretation has proved to be a dead end.

Existing studies merely emphasize the lack of consensus. In Colombia Reichel-Dolmatoff (1988) interprets almost every icon in terms of shamanic flights and transformations, though it is not clear how he distinguishes between an everyday creature and a 'shamanic' one, nor does he explain why so many people would want to wear shamanic emblems. There are similar problems in the Isthmus, where modern ethnography has been called in to interpret the prehispanic past (e.g. Snarskis 1985). The Chibcha-speaking Bribri people of Costa Rica, for example, are organized unto a system of twelve clans, each named after, and symbolized by, a particular animal. The Bribri recall that in past times they had three warrior classes (the jaguars, the red monkeys, and the 'two-headed ones'), and that their chiefs were chosen from the jaguar and monkey clans. Monkeys, jaguars and two-headed humans are ah represented in the prehispanic metalwork of Costa Rica, but perhaps we shouid not jump to simplistic conclusions. To the historic Bribri the jaguar was a 'hunter, kihler, warrior, clansman, unche, brother-in-haw, a symbol of power and the equivaient of the eagles aboye and the crocodiles in the water' (Bozzohi 1975: 180). Does a jaguar pendant express just one of these mean ings, or all of them simultaneously? Do the subsidiary figures and motifs that sometimes accompany the jaguar act as qualifyers, indicating which personification of the jaguar is intended? We simply do not know.