INTRODUCTION

The late pre-Hispanic societies of southwestern Colombia have served as “classic” examples in the chiefdom literature. The early Spanish colonizers found it easy to identify indigenous caciques and cacicazgos (or senores and senorios). The ethnohistoric sources on the Muisca and the Cauca Valley are especially rich in descriptions of wealthy and powerful chiefs promoting economic specialization and engaged in continual rivalry and warfare against each other, and these sources have been widely utilized by anthropologists (for example, Trimborn 1949; Carneiro 1990, 1991; Langebaek 1987, 1992).

There is also substantial precedent behind the application of the term “chiefdom” to the much earlier pre-Hispanic societies of the zone (for example, Reichel-Dolmatoff 1973). Some argument has focused on whether these societies were chiefdoms or not, but this argument depends on taking quite a narrow definition of “chiefdom” as a very specific societal type with a redistributive economy and a particular kind of kinship system. If “chiefdom” is used in a broader sense to refer to any society that encompasses more than a single local community and has some degree of institutionalized social inequality (Drennan and Uribe 1987), then it is clear that southwestern Colombia witnessed the emergence of numerous chiefdoms over a period of at least 1,500 years prior to the Spanish Conquest. Identifying a society as a chiefdom, based on such a broad definition, however, is not really to say very much; it is not a conclusion, but rather a starting point for investigation of the nature and variety of social organization that fits under this broad umbrella and of the forces that produce it (Drennan 1995a, 1996). A great deal of work still remains to be done in order to document just how complex these various societies were, as well as just how they were complex (Gnecco 1996a).

The environment of southwestern Colombia offers human populations rich and highly varied resources. The broad and relatively dry Andean cordillera of Ecuador becomes

Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell.

Springer, New York, 2008

Progressively wetter as one moves northward into Colombia, where it divides into Western, Central, and Eastern cordilleras (Figure 21.1). The chiefdoms discussed in this chapter lie within 6° north of the equator, so annual temperature variation is minimal, but permanently snowcapped volcanic peaks rise to more than 5,000 masl, towering over the hot deep trenches of the Cauca and Magdalena river valleys. Precipitation is at least adequate for rainfall agriculture across most of southwestern Colombia, and excess of precipitation makes flooding, erosion, and landslides more widespread problems than drought. Regions dry enough to make irrigation useful today do occur, however, at lower elevations, and the streams flowing from the cordilleras provide abundant water for such systems. Natural vegetation ranges from xerophytic in some relatively restricted hot low-elevation zones, through dry scrub forest to wetter varieties of tall tropical forest to the distinctive scrub, grassland, and swamp of the cold, wet paramo. Soils are varied but often locally very fertile and highly productive when planted with traditional crops that included maize, amaranth, manioc, beans, squash, coca, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and others.

The archaeological cultures that form the basic units of Colombian culture history are numerous and small, many extending across distances of 100 km or less. These cultures have been defined in stylistic terms, relying primarily on gold work and ceramics, with sporadic contributions from other items of material culture (such as sculpture or tombs) or from ethnohistoric sources. Where enough information is available to reconstruct the scale of sociopolitical units with much confidence, it is clear that multiple still smaller chiefly polities existed within the stylistic domain of a single archaeological culture. Stylistic integrity, then, does not correspond to sociopolitical integration. The small scale of sociopolitical units has sometimes been attributed to the difficulty of transportation and communication in the rugged mountain topography, but there is no indication of less fragmented political organization in the long, open valleys of the Magdalena and Cauca rivers, which form splendid avenues of communication. This paper is organized, then, according

To archaeological cultures, including only those for which there is enough information to enable discussion, not just of style and iconography, but of a trajectory of social change.