MUISCA

The Muisca (Figure 21.1) are not usually included under the heading of southwestern Colombia, but they are one of Colombia’s best-known chiefdoms ethnohistorically. Sixteenth century accounts are especially rich for the Muisca because a number of chiefdoms covered a large area (including the Spanish colonial capital), because their populations were quite high, and because their chiefs were very wealthy and at the apogee of their power at the moment of the Spanish Conquest. A considerable amount of archaeological research has been carried out in the Muisca area as well (Enciso and Therrien 1996), but it has been difficult in a number of respects to square the indications of social organization provided by the archaeological record with the often very detailed sixteenth century descriptions. The result has been that our common knowledge of Muisca chiefdoms has been based almost exclusively on ethnohistoric sources, with very little contribution from archaeology. Given this situation, it is not surprising that our vision of Muisca chiefdoms has tended to be very synchronic. This situation has changed considerably in recent years, and our archaeological understandings of Muisca society and its development are, as of this writing, advancing very rapidly.

The Muisca area lies on top of the Eastern Cordillera, extending some 200 km from one end to the other. Bogota, near the southwestern extreme of Muisca territory, takes its name from the Muisca chiefdom where the Spanish conquerors situated their city, and other Muisca chiefs’ settlements were scattered to the northeast, through the large, cool but well-watered, flat basin known as the Sabana de Bogota, at about 2,600 masl and beyond into the more dissected altiplano beyond it (Falchetti and Plazas 1973). Solid evidence of the beginning of sedentary agricultural life goes no farther back than about 400 BC, when the Herrera Period began. Very small egalitarian villages were scattered widely through the Muisca area (Langebaek 1995, 2001; Boada n. d. a, n. d. b). By the latter part of the Herrera Period, there began to be traces of economic specialization and social inequality, visible archaeologically at the site of El Venado in the form of within-community differences between the artifact and ecofact assemblages of different households and barrios (Boada 1999, 2006), although such differences did not appear at the site of Tiguasu (Salamanca 2001). Salt production on a substantial scale is evidenced at Zipaquira (Cardale 1981a, 1981b) and at other sites as well. Social prestige may have been based in part on participation in communal feasting (Boada 1999, 2006). Occupation spread into more of the many small subareas and valleys within Muisca territory, but population levels continued to be quite low (Langebaek 1995, 2001; Boada n. d. a, n. d. b). Despite the complete absence of regional population pressure, evidence from at least the southern Sabana de Bogota indicates that construction of the substantial areas of raised fields known for the region (Broadbent 1987) began in Herrera times (Boada n. d. a, n. d. b).

The Early Muisca Period, which followed Herrera, witnessed accelerated social change. Specialists in Muisca archaeology have, however, found it difficult to reach agreement on just which sites are contemporaneous with which others, and on when to place the transition from Herrera to Early Muisca, with the dates assigned ranging from as early as AD 200 (Boada n. d. a, n. d. b) to as late as AD 1000 (Langebaek 2001). Systematic regional surveys totaling some 400 km2 in Fuquene, the Valle de Leiva, and the Sabana northwest of Bogota (Langebaek 1995, 2001; Boada n. d. a, n. d. b) provide firm documentation of population growth, and this is echoed in the larger numbers of Early Muisca sites known generally across the region. Substantial unoccupied areas of highly productive soils, though, indicate that available resources could easily support much larger populations (Langebaek 1995, 2001; Boada n. d. a, n. d. b). Differences in artifact assemblages and burials between elite and non-elite households are much stronger than before (Boada 2006; Kruschek 2003). Communal feasting and chicha drinking was clearly concentrated at elite residences. This undoubtedly accounts for major concentrations of deer bone in such contexts, although it is also possible that elites ate more meat and better cuts of meat than non-elites. Textile production intensified, and evidence of it is especially abundant in elite households. Elite households also had a greater variety of items reflecting contacts with other communities, and congregated together in one spatially separate barrio of the community (Boada 1999, 2006). Analysis of burials, however, reveals only very modest evidence of social or economic differentiation (Boada 2000).

Around the northern and western fringes of modern Bogota, Early Muisca settlement was a mixture of moderately concentrated villages and dispersed rural households (Boada n. d. a, n. d. b). In the Valle de Leiva, a considerable majority of the Early Muisca regional population lived in two clear concentrations (Langebaek 2001), although the fragmentation of these two population concentrations into separate zones of occupation of varying size undermines meaningful definition of small local communities, or villages, and the notion of settlement hierarchy becomes irrelevant. This fragmentation seems the same phenomenon seen in greater detail in the internal division of the community at El Venado into spatially separate barrios (Boada 1999, 2006). Clearly visible, however, in the settlement distribution in the Valle de Leiva, are two higher-order communities, in the sense that Peterson and Drennan (2005) use the term: one at El Infiernito and one at Suta (Langebaek 2001; Henderson and Ostler 2005). The community at El Infiernito contained

Figure 21.7. The community at El Infiernito, in the Muisca area, contained a monumental construction, consisting of columnar stones set in two parallel rows and other less well preserved arrangements. (photo courtesy of Carl Langebaek)

A monumental construction, consisting of columnar stones set in two parallel rows and other less well preserved arrangements (Figure 21.7). This recalls the monumental burial complexes upon which higher-order communities were focused in Regional Classic Alto Magdalena (Langebaek 2001). At least at El Infiernito a tomb of large slabs covered with an earthen mound was adjacent to one arrangement of columns, although such associations are not consistently found. It is also hard to be confident of the date of these monuments’ construction and use. Two distinct barrios are detectable at El Infiernito from Herrera through Muisca times. The columnar stone monuments are in the larger of the two, which is where evidence of feasting and elite residence is concentrated in the Early and Late Muisca periods. At Tunja, the only other reported columnar stone monument associated with residential debris is likewise in an occupation spanning Herrera to Late Muisca. An area of especially high-density ceramic debris of both Early and Late Muisca periods at Suta has been labeled a chiefly residential compound. Some 600 m northwest of it, is a mound of apparent Late Muisca date and uncertain function (Henderson and Ostler 2005).

The total populations of these Early Muisca higher-order communities in the Valle de Leiva were very much smaller than those of the Regional Classic in the Alto Magdalena, and, while El Infiernito is not the only complex of monumental columns known for the Muisca area, such features are rare. Regional settlement distribution in Fuquene also shows some tendency to concentrate, but higher-order communities are not as conspicuous as in the Valle de Leiva, and none have monumental constructions. Sites in other parts of the Muisca area have been identified as very large villages (Falchetti 1975; Boada 1987), but it is difficult to compare them to Fuquene or the Valle de Leiva without more systematic knowledge of the distribution of occupation around them. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the regional centripetal forces that produced the ethnohistorically known Muisca chiefdoms were beginning to operate in Early Muisca times, if weakly and unevenly in different parts of the Muisca zone. In both Fuquene and the Valle de Leiva there is less correspondence between the distributions of settlement and agricultural resources during the Early Muisca period than previously, and it is hard to argue for elite control over prime agricultural land (Langebaek 1995, 2001). By the end of Late Herrera, gold work and mummification, both important in burials of Muisca elites at the time of the Spanish Conquest, had put in their appearance (Langebaek 2001).

The transition from Early to Late Muisca is placed somewhere between AD 1000 and 1200, and Late Muisca continues until the sixteenth century. All evidence points toward population levels at dramatic new highs (Langebaek 1995, 2001; Boada n. d. a, n. d. b). Early Muisca higher-order communities persisted in both Fuquene and the Valle de Leiva, and were joined by newly formed ones (Langebaek 1995, 2001). Fragmentation of the zones of occupation that comprise even the cores of these higher-order communities still makes identification of hierarchies of villages dubious, but the presence of the higher-order communities is unmistakable. These higher-order communities can sometimes be convincingly identified as specific chiefdoms discussed in sixteenth century documents, making clear that they were separate polities (Langebaek 2001). The populations of these communities in Fuquene and the Valle de Leiva were larger than in Early Muisca times, and their spatial extents increased somewhat, but they were still very much smaller in both spatial and demographic terms than the higher order communities of the Regional Classic in the Alto Magdalena. It must be noted, though, that neither of these areas of settlement study includes any of the larger and more powerful chiefdoms described in sixteenth century sources. Survey north and west of Bogota does approach the centers of more powerful sixteenth century chiefdoms, but areas of coverage are small and fragmented by modern urban occupation (Boada n. d. a). An orientation of settlement, and especially elite settlement, toward the most agriculturally productive land in Fuquene and the Valle de Leiva makes elite control of agricultural production a possibility for Late Muisca, although it was in Late Herrera times that settlement was most oriented to prime land (Langebaek 1995, 2001). The raised fields of the southern Sabana de Bogota continued in use, and ever larger areas of occupation are associated with them. There is, as yet, however, no clear indication of any special association between them and elite residential areas (Kruschek 2003; Boada n. d. a, n. d. b). Large areas of very productive soils were still under-occupied, bringing into question not only the existence of population pressure, but also the ability of those who did occupy productive locations to “control” the production of agricultural surpluses in any meaningful way. On the other hand, the investment in raised-field construction had become quite large by Late Muisca times. This could have tied commoner populations to specific locales as effectively as scarcity of agricultural land and provided an opportunity for elite control of subsistence production (Boada n. d. a)

While analysis of burials suggests somewhat stronger social and economic differentiation than in earlier periods, the range in quality and quantity of offerings in burials excavated by archaeologists is still quite limited, as is the variation in size and elaboration of tombs (Boada 1998, 2000; Buitrago and Rodriguez 2001; Pradilla 2001). Even rumors of rich tombs excavated by looters seem scarcer and more wispy in Muisca territory than, for example, in Calima. The bodies of sixteenth century Muisca elites were mummified and kept as more visible presences than the commoner bodies buried in cemeteries, and early colonial accounts describe the removal of large quantities of gold and emeralds from mummies stored in caves. It is true that the very richest chiefdoms reported in sixteenth century accounts have been little investigated by archaeologists, but where archaeological research has been carried out, socioeconomic differentiation is more conspicuous in evidence of how people lived than in evidence of how they were treated at death. At El Venado, for example, wealthy households are even more clearly identifiable than in Early Muisca times, by the same kinds of evidence as before (Boada 2006). Near Funza, lower status households may be more impoverished than before (Kruschek 2003). Spinning and weaving tools are more abundant at El Venado, and continue to be especially associated with wealthy households, as are items probably brought from other communities. This latter aspect of the pattern, however, is reversed at El Infiernito, where one readily identifiable imported ceramic type is more abundant in the lower status residential zone. Specialized pottery production is seen at La Asomada (Falchetti 1975). Ethnohistoric sources suggest highly developed networks of exchange of largely non-subsistence raw materials and craft products on a supra-regional but still relatively modest scale (Langebaek 1987, 1991, 1992). A rapidly growing barrio at El Venado with increasingly strong evidence of craft activities, feasting, and wealth may indicate the emergence of a rival faction, challenging the authority of the established elites (Boada 2006). The currency of such rivalry would appear to be resource mobilization through intensive craft production, extra-community contacts, and bolstering agricultural production, and the utilization of feasting simultaneously for infliction of social debt and social solidarity building.

The archaeological record is entirely consistent with the view, supported by ethno-history, that there was considerable variation in the scale of political integration and the wealth and power of elites in the numerous different polities that made up the Muisca zone. Colonial documents describe theocratic power in Tunja and military power in Bogota as well as different kinds of economic specializations in different parts of the Muisca area. Native interpreters from the northern part of the Muisca area who learned Spanish were not of use to early colonial administrators in the southern Muisca area because they could not understand the dialects spoken there. Archaeologically, gold work is more abundant in the south than the north, and ceramic types are different as well.