The oldest inhabitants of the Popayán Valley

Abstract

If America was initially populated from north to south by groups that migrated from northeast Asia across the Bering Strait at least 13,000 years ago, the area of what is now Colombia was necessarily crossed and populated by the first humans that entered and dispersed through South America. Colombia's strategic position, however, is not reflected in the information recovered so far about its first settlers, which archaeologists call Paleoindians. Archaeological research on the Paleoindian stage in Colombia has been carried out only in the last twenty years and has focused on the highlands of the Eastern Cordillera and the Magdalena Valley (e.g. Correal 1977, 1979, 1981; Correal and Van der Hammen 1977; Hurt et al. 1977) and has defined a sequence beginning about 11,000 years ago and extending, with some interruptions, until the appearance of agro-pottery communities. But apart from the work conducted in these two areas, the Colombian territory, so crucial for understanding how and when the settlement of South America occurred, has been a blank map dotted with a few chance and isolated finds of projectile points and other stone artifacts (e.g. Reichel-Dolmatoff 1965:46-50). Although it has been suggested that some of these finds correspond to the Paleoindian stage (Bruhns et al. Q976:69), their non-diagnostic typology and the absence of documentation make this suggestion to be considered with greater caution.

Several archaeological investigations carried out recently in the Andean region of southwestern Colombia, in the Popayán valley (Gnecco and Illera, 1990a, 1990b) and in the Upper and Middle Calima (Bray et al. 1977; Herrera et al. 1988; Gnecco and Salgado, 1989; Salgado 1989), have uncovered Paleoindian occupations that are expanding our knowledge of the prehistory of the country in the early Holocene.