CONCLUSION

Numerous other regions in southwestern Colombia also witnessed the development of preColumbian chiefdoms. Some of them are home to very famous archaeological cultures, about which we just do not have complete enough archaeological information to discuss social, political, or economic organization or sufficient chronological control to know how these things changed through time. The Quimbaya culture, for example, located in the Cauca Valley just north of Calima, produced a large amount of very fine metallurgy, well known to looters for quite some time (Perez de Barradas 1966; Plazas 1978; Llanos 1986). Complementary archaeological information, however, is fragmentary in the extreme. Valiant efforts to integrate this information, and add to it still find themselves at the beginning of the task (for example, Gonzalez and Barragan 2001), and recent syntheses are forced to speak of the entire 3000 years prior to the Spanish Conquest as a single undifferentiated block of time (for example, Rodriguez 2002). As Cardale and Herrera (1995: 195) have put it, “Southwestern Colombia is a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. The map of best known archaeological zones is simultaneously the distribution map of active archaeologists.”

In such a situation, there is an understandable tendency to rely heavily on generalizations about Colombian chiefdoms (or even Ecuadorian, Venezuelan, and Central American chiefdoms) derived mostly from descriptions written during the sixteenth century. When all the gaps between tiny scraps of archaeological information for long sequences in a number of regions, though, are just filled in with generic accounts of wealthy and powerful chiefs, wearing lots of gold, and continually at war with each other, then the societies of all periods and all regions come out sounding just alike, and we lose the opportunity to investigate to just what extent they might have differed from each other or by just what courses they came to be as they were. And, while all the regions discussed in this paper did see the pre-Hispanic development of what have been broadly labeled chiefdoms, there is considerable variation in the character and pacing of these developments.

At least some degree of social inequality can be found fairly far back in most of the sequences discussed here, but each comes to a point at which there is a dramatic increase in social hierarchy and sociopolitical centralization, accompanied by soaring regional population levels. This happened earliest in Tumaco, with the appearance of the gold work, ceramic art, tombs, and structures on mounds that mark the Tumaco-La Tolita culture from about 350 BC. The Alto Magdalena was next, with the emergence of the monumental burial complex and the great intensification of centralized high-order communities around AD 1. Fewer kinds of evidence are available for Calima, but lavish tombs, population growth, an increase in nucleated communities, and more intensive forms of cultivation mark the same time period from about AD 1. In Tierradentro a threshold of population growth and nucleated communities may have been crossed somewhat later—about AD 300. Such a concentrated period of social change probably did not come to the Muisca area until about AD 1000 and still continued vigorously after AD 1200. These episodes of greatly accelerated social change, spread as they are across some 1,300 or 1,400 years, would thus seem to be driven by largely local forces, since processes operating all across southwestern Colombia ought to have produced greater chronological correspondence.

This is not to say that the regions discussed here were not in contact with each other. They unquestionably were, and they shared a set of beliefs represented in an iconography that makes it possible, for example, to define a southwestern Colombian tradition of gold work (Plazas and Falchetti 1983; Bray 2000). This iconography can be traced right into Alto Magdalena sculpture as well (Bray 2000, 2005). Long-distance trade involving large quantities of a wide variety of both luxury and non-luxury goods is reconstructed on this basis, together with Ilama ceramic figures from Calima depicting people with cargo baskets on their backs, and traces of roads on the landscape, some of which have been shown to be in use in pre-Hispanic times (Cardale and Herrera 1995; Cardale 1996, 2005). A more conservative view sees long-distance trade limited to luxury goods moving through contacts between elites in different regions seeking to legitimize their social positions (Gnecco 1996b). A still more conservative view does not deny widely shared beliefs and iconography, but stresses the extremely small quantity of even luxury items, especially from the Alto Magdalena, that can be conclusively shown to be the product of inter-regional exchange (Drennan 2000), and emphasizes that objects in “foreign” styles are very often locally made.

Not only did the episodes of rapid social change discussed above come at different times, they produced chiefdoms of distinctly different character. The monumental funerary complexes of the Alto Magdalena seem to represent intensely personalized leadership patterns built largely on religious and symbolic foundations with only poorly developed economic differentiation or specialization. In Tumaco and Calima chiefdoms, elite tombs are not monumental (or even visible once the burial has been made), but they contain considerable amounts of personal possessions as offerings. This, together with extremely laborious means of intensifying agricultural production through raised fields, may be the clue to a stronger economic component to social hierarchy in these societies, even though ideology was by no means irrelevant to the establishment of chiefly positions (Langebaek 2003). A few monumental constructions exist for Early Muisca chiefdoms, but they may have emphasized communal public space, more than highly personal memorials, and economic differentiation and craft specialization are more readily identifiable in the archaeological record, giving yet a different flavor to Muisca social hierarchy from early on in its developmental trajectory.

Tumaco chiefdoms disintegrated around AD 350, with population decline, disuse of raised field complexes, cessation of such elaborate tombs, and other archaeological manifestations often identified as societal collapse. In Calima, raised fields used in earlier times went out of use sometime between AD 500 and 800, although population appears to have grown, and gold work continued to be abundant, but less concentrated into lavish tombs. In the Alto Magdalena, the early chiefdoms were punctuated about AD 900 by change of yet a different sort, as population grew and concentrated even more strongly into higher-order communities. Several different lines of evidence point tantalizingly in the direction of an increasingly strong economic component to sociopolitical hierarchy, with more craft specialization and more intensive forms of agriculture. The AD 1200 transition from Early Muisca to Late Muisca does not speak so strongly of a change in social direction but rather of a further intensification of previously visible trends. All this amounts to a remarkably varied pattern of changes in just a few regions not very widely separated from each other. The complicated and varied interplay between economic and symbolic bases of power, between subsistence and craft economies, between highly personal and more communal leadership, and between nascent and fully institutionalized social hierarchy produces a rich array of different social forms within the broadly defined chiefdom class. This array altogether fails to correspond to any simple dichotomy or single gradient, such as the recently popular one playing a corporate mode of organization off against a network mode (Blanton et al. 1996). The multiple important axes of variation just do not fall into the simple pattern of correlation suggested (for example, by Feinman 2001). This situation does, however, offer rich opportunities for continued research aimed at providing fuller and more reliable reconstructions of the nature of the societies that developed in pre-Hispanic southwestern Colombia so as to sustain further efforts to understand the processes that produced them and gave them their distinctive characters.

Acknowledgments I am very grateful to Carlos Armando Rodriguez, Ana Maria Boada, and Marianne Cardale and her co-authors for providing copies of important work in press and for permission to cite it here. Carl Langebaek also generously shared as yet unpublished information and made very thoughtful and useful comments on the manuscript. None of these colleagues should be blamed for any misuse I may have made of their information or ideas.