Nicaragua's Cultural Identity Heist — The Short Version
The essentials of the full investigation, for readers with five minutes. The complete story — 20 chapters, 31 years — is on my Substack.
The moment that started it
In 1997, two years into living and working in the Nicaraguan pottery village of San Juan de Oriente, I walked through the American Museum of Natural History in New York and stopped cold. The ancient polychrome pottery in the cases was unmistakably the same tradition as the work being revived in my village — the same forms, the same iconography, the same ancestral hands. Every label said Costa Rica. The map of ancient Central America on the wall didn't color in Nicaragua at all.
Twenty-eight years later, in 2025, I went back. Nothing had changed.
The question at the center
Why are Gran Nicoya objects in museums around the world labeled "Costa Rica" instead of being credited to their actual cultural heritage — a zone centered in Nicaragua?
The Gran Nicoya was a pre-Columbian cultural zone running from the Gulf of Fonseca down through Nicaragua's great lakes and Pacific coast, and only at its southern tip into Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula. Its sacred heart was Ometepe Island in Lake Nicaragua — a ceremonial and burial destination for millennia. Most of the zone, and most of the objects, are Nicaraguan.
How the heist happened — the short timeline
1879–1887. The first big collections are assembled by foreigners and elites based in San José, Costa Rica — over 1,000 objects shipped to Germany labeled "Costa Rica," and a 3,500-object collection that becomes the founding collection of Costa Rica's National Museum. The label follows the collector's address, not the objects' origin.
1892. At the Madrid Historical American Exposition, the truth is on open display: Nicaragua's own section catalogues polychrome vessels from Ometepe, Zapatera, and Rivas. That documented record is then, effectively, buried.
1926. Harvard-trained archaeologist Samuel Lothrop publishes Pottery of Costa Rica and Nicaragua, honestly describing a two-country zone — and then presides over museum curation that classifies it all as Costa Rican anyway.
1914 onward. Banana and railroad magnate Minor Keith, who controlled vast lands in Costa Rica, ships a staggering ~16,000-object collection to New York on his own boats. It enters the museum world branded "the Keith collection — Costa Rica."
1933 onward. Doris Stone — daughter of Samuel Zemurray, the man who took over United Fruit — becomes the dominant institutional voice on the region's archaeology: director of Costa Rica's National Museum, positions at Harvard's Peabody and Tulane. For decades, "Costa Rican jade" and "Costa Rican pottery" are cemented as the official story.
The mechanism: provenance vs. provenience
Museums track provenance — the ownership history: Keith bought it, Stone curated it, the museum holds it. What got erased is provenience — where the object actually came from out of the ground: Ometepe, Zapatera, the Gran Nicoya. The collector's name and country stuck to the objects; the culture's didn't.
The green stones
The famous "Costa Rican jade" deepens the problem: there are no jadeite deposits in Costa Rica, and the finest carved green stones lack Costa Rican archaeological context. The evidence points to sacred objects carried into the region and buried at ceremonial centers like Ometepe — yet an entire national museum brand, the Museo del Jade, is built on the Costa Rican label.
Proof the mislabel still governs
In 2011 and 2020, the Brooklyn Museum returned 2,286 objects from the Keith collection — to Costa Rica. The century-old classification was never re-examined; the return simply reinforced it. And the AMNH exhibit that stopped me in 1997 stands unrevised today.
Why it matters
Nicaragua has been cut off from its own cultural heritage on the international stage for over a century. Meanwhile the heritage is still alive: in San Juan de Oriente, master potter Don Gregorio Bracamonte spent decades reviving the ancestral pottery tradition, and the village's artisans carry it forward today — a living link to the very objects sitting mislabeled in the world's museums.
What should change
Museums should re-label Gran Nicoya objects by their cultural zone and true provenience — not by the collector who bought them or the country he lived in. Scholars should name the zone for what it was: transnational, centered in Nicaragua. And Nicaragua's place in the cultural history of the Americas should be restored to the conversation it was erased from.
Paul Henry Devoti has lived and worked with the potters of San Juan de Oriente, Nicaragua since 1995. Read the full investigation on Substack, find his books on the history and pottery of San Juan de Oriente, and see the living tradition in his one-of-a-kind ceramic sculptures.
