For guests intrigued by culture, development of social orders, craftsmanship, and history - or are just needing to kill a brief period - there are a few galleries in midtown San Jose that offer a brief look into the existences of the individuals who preceded us.
Two of them, each directly in the core of downtown San Jose, and inside simple strolling distance, give understanding into two fundamental ages including emotional changes in culture, custom, and fantasy.
1. The Jade Museum
Housed in the Instituto Nacional de Seguras, the tallest structure in San Jose (it's midtown), is the world's biggest assortment of pre-Columbian jade, with carvings - some very mind boggling - dating to 600 B.C.
While it's realized that the soonest people in Costa Rica showed up around 12,000-14,000 years before Columbus, when mastodons, mammoths, saber toothed felines, and ground sloths the size of elephants meandered this little nation, jade seems to have been minimal something other than another beautiful stone until multifaceted jade carvings apparently burst onto the scene practically overnight (allegorically).
Its appearance addressed a fundamental, emotional change in culture and conviction frameworks including philosophy, strict ceremonies, and material culture. Curiously, by far most of the carvings portray creatures, not people, recommending maybe a mythic and force presenting imagery.
2. The Gold Museum
The Costa Rica Gold Museum is found right nearby to the National Theater yet you can stroll all around and never see it since it's underground! Appears to be that space is somewhat restricted midtown and, since a little open square was at that point surviving, the lone spot left was beneath it.
To get to it, basically track down the National Theater, head over to the road behind it, and search for the Gold Museum.
Similarly as the jade carvings' abrupt appearance (over only a couple hundreds of years) significantly changed the way of life and conviction frameworks of the clans of Costa Rica, the appearance of gold around 400-700 A.D., addressed another sensational change in material culture.
In a metaphorical chronicled "squint of-an-eye" jade was supplanted by gold as the transcendent significant material. Carvings (jade) was supplanted by metallurgy (gold).
That esteem, notwithstanding, wasn't considered as monetary or business in nature (rather than the Europeans at that point and the present reality).
All things being equal, the people groups of Costa Rica saw gold as something sufficiently important to give them knowledge into the world past, an investigate the universe, and the figures they made after dominating metallurgy were images of powerful divinities.
Obviously, jade wasn't the main material one day and supplanted by gold the following. The change included a cover of time as gold was fused into a prior, age-old, universe of culture and custom until, eventually, the old perspectives and conviction (addressed by jade) were supplanted by more up to date thought and conviction frameworks (addressed by gold).
Unquestionably, the vast majority who visit either exhibition hall do as such to appreciate the excellence and miracle of the craftsmanship, not to consider why these articles were made or what they reflected culture as well as meant for it.
However, by the day's end, just appreciating excellence might be all that could possibly be needed.
