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.
