Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff - Career

Career

Reichel-Dolmatoff gradually developed a keen interest for conducting fieldwork which would take him and his studies throughout the country, from the jungles of the Amazon to the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

Gerardo’s initial research was essential in creating the basic chronological framework for most of the Colombian area, and is still used today. In a trip to the upper Meta River in the Orinoco plains in 1940, he conducted research and later published the earliest studies ever done on the Guahibo Indians.

In 1943 Gerardo wrote his first article on the Muisca settlement of Soacha. That same year, together with his wife Alicia, he conducted an analysis on the burial urns of the Magdalena River. Working in the Tolima region inhabited by renowned indigenous leader Quintin Lame, they also published a study indicating the indigenous culture of the local populations and also indicated the blood type variations among the indigenous groups of the Pijao in the Department of Tolima as further proof of their Amerindian identity, as these tribes were arguing over rights to ancestral lands.

Switching residency to the city of Santa Marta in 1946, the Reichel-Dolmatoffs created and headed the Instituto Etnologico del Magdalena which included a small museum about the anthropology and archeology of the Sierra Nevada region. Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote a two volume monography of the Kogi in the 1940s which to this day is considered a classic reference. For the next five years, Gerardo and his colleague and wife conducted research throughout the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region, focusing particularly on the Tairona’s descendants, the Koguis, also known as the Kogi or Kaggaba, and also to the Arhuaco and Wiwa, as well as the people of Aritama (Kankuamo), They also did research in the Pacific coast and studied the Kuna Indians of the Caiman Nuevo River, west of the Gulf of Uraba. Several years later, Gerardo published an ethnohistorical study of the Kogi, demonstrating their connections to ancestral Tairona chiefdoms.

In the late 1950s, Gerardo and his family moved to the coastal city of Cartagena. He taught classes in medical anthropology at the university there and engaged in programs of public health with an anthropological perspective. Actively involved in archeological excavations in the Caribbean region around Cartagena, on 1954, the Reichel-Dolmatoffs located and excavated the Barlovento site, which was the first early Formative shell-midden site found in Colombia. At Momil they conducted the first study of subsistence change in Colombian archaeology from shifting cultivation (maize) to corn agriculturalists. After returning to Bogotá in 1960 to found and Chair the first Department of Anthropology in Colombia, Gerardo began fieldwork at the site of Puerto Hormiga where they discovered the earliest dated pottery in all of the New World (at that time), at over 5 thousand years old- which indicated that pottery had been first developed in the Caribbean coast of Colombia and then spread elsewhere to the rest of the Americas and hence was not brought through diffusion from the Old World .

In 1963, he and his wife created the first Department of Anthropology in Colombia at the Universidad de Los Andes. Gerardo received a visiting fellowship to Cambridge University in 1970 and also later became an adjunct professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California-Los Angeles. During the 1960s and until the mid-1990s Reichel-Dolmatoff advanced in depth research on Amerindian shamanism, indigenous modes of life and their cosmologies and worldviews, and he also did research on entheogens, ethnoastronomy, ethnobotany, ethnozoolgy, and on the architecture of temples and of maloca longhouse; additionally he did research on the shamanic symbolism of pre-Columbian goldwork, as well as other artifacts and cultural material.

Reichel-Dolmatoff was a a member of the Colombian Academy of Sciences and a Foreign Associate Member of the NAS National Academy of Sciences of the United States. He was also a member of the Academia Real Española de Ciencias, and was given the Thomas H. Huxley medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1975. He was the author of 33 books and hundreds of articles, all dedicated to the archeology and anthropology of Colombia and specifically highlighting the relevance of indigenous peoples of the past and present.

In 1983, he became one of the founding members of the Third World Academy of Sciences. which was created and headed by Abdus Salam (Nobel Prize in Physics) with renowned scientists of the Third World who sought to focus differently on the issues of science and technology for the interests of the developing countries themselves.

While living in Colombia for over half a century, Reichel-Dolmatoff provided his professional services to the national and departmental governments, and as university professor, researcher and author to public and private universities. In 1945 he founded in Santa Marta the Instituto Ethnologico Nacional of the Magdalena, and in the early 1950s he was a professor at the University of Cartagena. In 1964 Reichel-Dolmatoff founded Colombia’s first Department of Anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota. He occupied, amongst other positions, those of researcher and lecturer of the Instituto Etnologico Nacional and the Colombian Institute of Anthropology, he was Chair and professor of the Department of Anthropology of the Universidad de los Andes. He was also Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge, Visiting Professor of the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan, and was Adjunct Professor at the University of California Los Angeles. Reichel-Dolmatoff participated in numerous academic congresses and seminars and gave many conference papers in universities and international or national academic events in South America, North America and Central America as well as in Europe, Japan. In the field of Archaeologoy Reichel-Dolmatoff helped define in Colombian lands the earl archeological evidence of the Formative Phase which allowed interpreting connections of the cultural evolution of Colombia to other regions of the Americas, he also researched origins of early chiefdoms as well as the millenarian evolution of Amerindian cultures and their links to some contemporary indigenous groups (including those in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta). Reichel-Dolmatoff excavated archeological sites in many regions of Colombia in the Caribbean Coast, Pacific and in the Andean and inter-Andean areas as well as in the lowland Llanos. His excavations focused mainly on house sites and refuse and garbage heaps and he avoided exploring or excavating monumental sculptures, monumental architecture and indigenous burial sites. In the field of Anthropology Reichel-Dolmatoff focused on investigating and celebrating Colombia’s ethnic and cultural diversity and especially of indigenous peoples. The scope and extent of his work and dedication to understanding, acknowledging and disseminating the importance and value of Colombia's contemporary indigenous peoples was very significant.