Pre-Hispanic occupation of Alto Patía

Abstract

The Patía, which flows for a length of 360 kilometers through the departments of Cauca and Nariño, and whose basin covers an area of more than 24,000 square kilometers, is one of the most unique rivers in the country; in its upper part it forms an inter-Andean valley located at an average of 700 meters above sea level, while its middle and lower courses are perpendicular to the Andes. The whole is a natural communication route between the Pacific lowlands and the mountainous interior. This characteristic was one of the two reasons that led us to conduct the research on which this paper is based, carried out in the general area of the Alto Patía (which includes the valleys of several rivers, the Guachicono and San Jorge, among them) during 1983 and 1984 with funding from the Fundación de Investigaciones Arqueológicas Nacionales del Banco de la República (National Archaeological Research Foundation of the Banco de la República). The other was the almost total archaeological ignorance of the area; although only the work of Henri Lehman (1953) carried out there in the 1940s was available, the particularity of the ceramic assemblage and funerary constructions of the Patía and Guachicono valleys had already been mentioned (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1965:132-133). Since it is impossible to include here all the information obtained by us in those two years, in this article we have limited ourselves to present the most outstanding features of the pre-Hispanic occupation of the upper part of the Patía and Guachicono river valleys. More specific data can be found in Patiño (1982), Patiño and Gnecco (1983) and Gnecco and Patiño (1989).