Matson Museum director James Doyle awarded Fulbright for book project

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — James Doyle, director of Penn State’s Matson Museum of Anthropology and research professor of anthropology, has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award for the 2026-27 academic year.

Doyle will use the six-month grant to conduct research in Panama for his forthcoming book, “Gran Coclé: The Royal Arts of Ancestral Panama,” which will be published by the University of Texas Press. The book will focus on reevaluating the art and archaeology of the Gran Coclé culture that ruled over Central Panama from about A.D. 500-1100.

The Fulbright will allow Doyle to review collections, visit archaeological sites and meet with Indigenous communities through partnerships with Panama’s Center for Historical, Anthropological and Cultural Research, the Panamanian Ministry of Culture, the El Caño Foundation, the University of Panama and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City.

He also received funding from the College of the Liberal Arts and the George Dewey and Mary J. Krumrine Endowment in the College of Arts and Architecture.

“I’m very excited and grateful to receive the Fulbright,” Doyle said. “I do believe these types of collaborations are very important in terms of production of knowledge and sharing of information so that we can come to a greater understanding of who we are as humans and how this case study can inform how we think about different ways of social organization in both the past and the present.”

Doyle said his idea for the project goes back more than a decade, when he was a postdoctoral fellow at Dumbarton Oaks Museum in Washington, D.C. There, he was first introduced to the art of the Gran Coclé while working on a catalog of Indigenous works from Costa Rica, Panama and Colombia. From there, he saw some of the culture’s artworks in person at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

“After I saw these things in person, I thought, ‘Why aren’t we talking more about this material?’” he said. “It’s extraordinary, both for what it’s made of — gold and emerald and shell and all of these very interesting luxury goods — and because the imagery is unique in the Americas, both in terms of the regalia people wore and the painted pottery. It’s one of the great pottery traditions in the ancient world that I don’t think has been recognized enough.”

Doyle later worked on Panamanian collections during his previous position as assistant curator for arts of the ancient Americas at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, and included the Gran Coclé in his illustrated textbook, “Arts of the Ancient Americas,” which will be published this fall by Thames & Hudson’s “World of Art” series.

Last summer, Doyle returned to Dumbarton Oaks on a fellowship that allowed him to get reacquainted with the research he conducted as a postdoc. This summer, he’s continuing that work as a Leonard A. Lauder Visiting Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at Washington’s National Gallery of Art.

Just as it is today, Panama was an integral center of commerce in the ancient Americas and the seafaring Gran Coclé traded with a host of Mesoamerican peoples, including the Maya. Their success as traders is reflected in the artwork they left behind — elaborately painted ceramics and ornaments of cast and hammered metals, greenstone, fragrant plant resins, and aquatic-themed artifacts like shark teeth, stingray spines and sperm whale teeth overlayed with gold foil.

These works, Doyle said, formed “some of the richest entombments in the ancient world.”

“What struck me is how inventive and innovative the artists were in a variety of media,” he said. “You have some cast gold objects that invite the viewer to look at the object in different ways. For instance, if you look at it straight on, you see a person holding something. But if you look at it from the side, it’s actually a diving bird. They’re playing with this shift in perspective that I think we would think of as cubist in the Western art way, but this was happening 1,000 years prior to Picasso.

“With the hammered gold objects, there are these beautiful plaques that people would have worn as part of their regalia,” he continued. “They’re really going above and beyond to create these scenes that are hard to decipher. So, you might have this frontal view of a sort of crocodilian creature, but its body unzips to either side and there are two other creatures in profile. There’s an elaborate religious world that’s reflected in these objects, even though we don’t have access to the text.”

Through the project, Doyle hopes to provide new insights about distinct forms of governance in human societies.

“What we’re actually looking at is a different way of organizing people that didn’t emphasize the things that were emphasized in other parts of the ancient world,” he said. “My argument in the book is going to be that these were mainly marine peoples — a lot of their imagery, and even the materials, comes from the sea. The power or the claims these people were making were more about rights to the sea, or actual perishable materials, like sea-going canoes and rafts, that we don’t have any archaeological evidence of. I’m trying to elevate the language we use when referring to these people who were important players in the mosaic of ancient American societies.”

Beyond the book, Doyle has other aims for the project. Next April, he and other scholars in the field will hold a roundtable discussion on the Gran Coclé at Dumbarton Oaks, with the ultimate intention of producing an edited volume.

He also hopes the project leads to future experiential learning opportunities for undergraduates and graduate students through the Matson Museum and the ANTH 480: Museum Studies course he teaches.

“I feel really empowered by our active and supportive anthropology department to take on these projects,” Doyle said. “It’s been a great fit for me.”