Civilization

Quimbaya Civilization

Middle Cauca valley people renowned for exquisite tumbaga goldwork including the iconic poporo lime containers.

A poporo from the middle Cauca begins as a model in wax. The smith shapes a hollow gourd in a beeswax-and-resin paste, draws out a long neck, then builds onto it a body that is not a vessel at all but a person — a nude figure seated on a low stool, eyes half closed, hands resting on the knees or laid across the chest, the whole of it no larger than a forearm. The wax is sheathed in a jacket of fine charcoal and clay, baked until the model runs out and a cavity remains in its exact shape, and into that cavity a molten alloy of gold and copper is poured. When the mold is broken away the figure emerges grey and dull, its gold hidden inside an alloy skin. Only then comes the work that makes it shine: the surface is heated and bathed in acid plant juices, again and again, until the copper at the skin burns away and a film of near-pure gold is left standing on a body that is mostly something else. The object that results — sober, smooth, almost without ornament — is among the most arresting things made anywhere in the ancient Americas, and it was made to be buried.

The people who made it lived in the valley of the upper and middle Cauca River, in the warm folded country of present-day Quindío, Risaralda, and Caldas, with extensions into Antioquia and the northern Valle del Cauca. This is not the high cold puna of the central Andes but a green intermontane corridor between the Cordillera Central and the Cordillera Occidental, broken by ridges and quebradas, dense with maize, with the river running north through it toward the Caribbean lowlands. To call the people the Quimbaya is already to make a decision the evidence does not entirely support, and the name carries a tangle worth unpicking at the outset — but it is the name under which their work entered the world’s museums, and it stands for the gold-using society, or societies, of the middle Cauca across some sixteen centuries.

Who the Quimbaya were, and the trouble with the name

The Quimbaya proper were a chiefdom-level people whom Spanish chroniclers met in the sixteenth century: a society of hereditary lords, ranked households, and an economy of redistribution rather than tribute-empire. The early sources describe a densely settled province governed by a great many small lords — the figure of some eighty hereditary caciques is repeated in the colonial record, each the head of his own village, the cacicazgos confederated or semi-independent across the land between the Cauca and the Risaralda. Population at contact is estimated in the range of sixty to eighty thousand. They were farmers of maize and other crops on the warm slopes, weavers of cotton, and — above all in the memory they left — workers of metal.

A difficulty follows at once. The dazzling goldwork that bears the Quimbaya name was made long before any Spaniard reached the valley, much of it in the first centuries of the Common Era; the people the conquistadors actually met were the inheritors of that landscape, not necessarily the makers of those objects. The archaeologist Karen Olsen Bruhns, who surveyed more than sixty sites in the middle Cauca in the 1960s, divided the region’s ceramics into two distinct complexes — an earlier Middle Cauca complex and a later Caldas complex, the latter marked by red-and-black resist-painted ware and a shift from inhumation to cremation — and argued forcefully that the classic goldwork could not be securely pinned to the historical Quimbaya chiefdoms at all. On her reading, and on much of the scholarship since, Quimbaya as a label for the gold is less the name of one continuous nation than a museum convention: a style and a region, gathered under the name of the people who happened to be living there when the written record began. The name endures in that broad sense, the caution attached to it.

Two horizons in the valley

Scholars who work on the middle Cauca generally read the sequence as two long horizons. The earlier — variously the Early or Classic Quimbaya, the period of the finest metalwork — runs from roughly the last centuries BCE through the middle of the first millennium CE, with its zenith conventionally placed between about the fourth and the seventh century. This is the horizon of the great seated figures and the celebrated poporos: spare, naturalistic, technically without rival in the region. The later horizon — the Late Quimbaya, broadly the second half of the first millennium and on toward the eve of conquest, embracing Bruhns’s Caldas complex — shows a more crowded and various world, more sites and more people, a turn toward cremation burial, and a goldwork that trades the earlier serenity for a denser, more schematic ornament. The two are not simply earlier and later versions of one thing; the discontinuity is part of why the single name sits uneasily over the whole.

Across these horizons the valley sat inside a much wider sphere of metallurgical knowledge. Goldworking in the northern Andes ran on its own current, distinct in style and chemistry from the great traditions of Peru — the cult-metalwork of Chavín, the lavish funerary gold of the north-coast lords of Moche and the Sicán (Lambayeque), the highland gold of Tiwanaku and Wari, the textile-and-feather idiom of Nazca, and the later imperial metal of Chimú. Far to the north the lost-wax tradition reached the workshops of Mesoamerica, the Mixtec goldsmiths and, deeper still in time, the sculptural world of the Olmec. Within Colombia itself the Quimbaya shared the broad goldworking koiné of the Chibchan-speaking world — the salt-and-emerald Muisca confederation of the eastern altiplano, the terraced stone country of the Tairona in the far north. The middle Cauca’s contribution to that shared knowledge was a particular mastery of casting.

The metallurgical heart: tumbaga and the colored surface

The signature material is tumbaga — an alloy of gold and copper, often with some natural silver, which the smiths of Colombia raised to the level of a fine art. The copper was not an adulterant grudgingly tolerated; it was a tool. Adding it lowers the melting point of the metal, makes it flow more readily into the fine extremities of a mold, and yields castings of a delicacy pure gold cannot easily match. Much Quimbaya work runs to a high copper content — analyses of the famous Treasure find pieces in which copper is a substantial fraction of the body — so that the metal as cast is reddish or pale rather than golden.

The brilliance was added afterward, by the technique known as depletion gilding, or in the older European phrase mise en couleur — bringing to color. The object was heated so that the copper at its surface oxidized, then immersed in an acidic bath of plant juices and minerals that dissolved the oxide away; repeated, the cycle stripped copper from the skin and left a thin enrichment of gold standing proud of the alloy beneath. The piece thus wears gold without being gold throughout — a golden body over a heart of baser metal. The technical study of the Quimbaya Treasure by Alicia Perea and colleagues mapped exactly this: a repertoire of lost-wax casting in several variants, surface enrichment to produce the golden skin, hammering and inlay, and even casting-on to repair flaws — the full chain of operations by which a wax model became a luminous metal body.

Lost-wax casting — cera perdida — was the central craft. Hollow objects were cast over a clay core held by metal pins; large pieces were cast in parts and joined. The Poporo Quimbaya, the single most famous survival, was assembled from separately cast elements: the head, the lower legs, and the little stool were each cast and then soldered to the body. The result is a unity so smooth that the seams vanish. The skill was not anonymous routine. To pour a sealed mold blind, to control the flow of an alloy through narrow channels, to know how many cycles of heating and pickling would bring the gold up without warping the form — this is metallurgy held as deep knowledge, and the deepest of that knowledge went into objects that would never be sold or worn in any market sense.

What gold meant in this world is best read against the wider northern-Andean grammar of the metal. In the iconographic study Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff made of the collection of the Museo del Oro, the brilliance of gold is not decoration but a property charged with meaning — its color and its incorruptible shine bound up with the sun, with heat and fertility, with the transformations a shaman undergoes in trance and the transformation the smith works on matter itself. The smith’s furnace and the shaman’s flight belong, in this reading, to one order of ideas: both turn one state of being into another. The instinct that links the working of metal to the working of the soul is an old and wide one — it runs through the alchemy of the Old World as surely as through the metallurgy of the New, two unconnected traditions that each saw in the reddening and brightening of metal an image of inner change. To wear gold, or to be buried in it, was to take on something of that solar, transforming power, and it is in that charge, more than in any market value, that this goldwork later took its place in the modern study of Latin American esotericism.

The poporo and the chewing of coca

The poporo is the form in which all of this concentrates. It is a lime container — a small flask, often a stylized gourd, holding the powdered lime burned from seashells or stone. Lime is the alkaline agent of coca chewing: a wad of coca leaves held in the cheek, touched with lime on a moistened dipping-stick, releases the leaf’s alkaloids and yields the steady, clarifying lift that coca gives. In the Andes and the northern cordilleras this was never recreational in the modern sense. Coca was a plant of endurance and of contemplation, of divination and of formal social exchange; the act of chewing it was woven into ritual and into the marking of who a person was. The poporo and its dipping-stick were the apparatus of that act, and the finest of them were made of gold.

In Quimbaya hands the poporo became a votive object of extraordinary refinement, and a statement of status. The classic examples take the human body for their model — most famously the seated nude figures whose calm, near-abstract bodies give the gold an almost contemplative stillness. The Poporo Quimbaya itself, cast in tumbaga around the early centuries CE and now the emblem of the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, is a vessel built in the rounded form of a gourd, its swelling body read by some scholars as a feminine form, its long neck rising to a small mouth. The Banco de la República bought it in 1939 to keep it from being melted, and that purchase was the seed of the gold museum that grew up around it. Around the poporos stands a wider corpus: anthropomorphic pendants and figures, helmet-like ornaments, nose ornaments and ear ornaments, pectorals and beads, and a teeming bestiary of cast animals — birds, frogs and lizards, fish among them the long-bodied flying-fish forms, felines, and insects rendered with a jeweler’s attention to the moth, the butterfly, the dragonfly.

A modern detour: the golden jets

A handful of those small zoomorphic pendants — the flying-fish and bird forms, with their swept tail and lateral fins — have been seized on outside archaeology and recast as models of aircraft, the so-called Quimbaya airplanes or golden jets, offered as proof of ancient flight or extraterrestrial contact. The claim, kept alive in the ancient-astronaut literature after the naturalist Ivan T. Sanderson remarked that one specimen looked mechanical to him, does not survive contact with the corpus it is drawn from. The pieces sit within a large, coherent series of stylized animals — the same swept forms recur as unmistakable fish, sharks, and winged insects — made by smiths who modeled the creatures of their own warm valley with great fidelity and had no concept whatever of a twentieth-century fuselage. The supposed aircraft are a fact about modern reception, not about the Quimbaya; they belong to the history of how this goldwork has been misread, and to nothing in the valley itself.

The afterlife of the gold: tombs, looters, and a dispersed corpus

Almost everything known of Quimbaya metalwork comes from the grave. The gold was made for the dead — deposited in shaft-and-chamber tombs and pit graves as the furniture of the next existence, the ornaments the dead would wear and the companions, in figure-form, who would attend them; in the later horizon the body itself was often cremated and gathered into an urn, the gold laid in around it. This is the deepest fact about the corpus and the most consequential. The objects were never meant to circulate among the living. They were sealed underground, and they re-entered the world only when the ground was opened.

It was opened, overwhelmingly, by looters. From the colonial period onward the recovery of Quimbaya gold was the work of guaqueros — diggers of the guacas, the tombs — who found the metal, sold it, and melted much of it for bullion long before any archaeologist could record a context. The consequence is a corpus magnificent in its objects and impoverished in its information: thousands of pieces in museums and private hands with no secure record of where they lay, beside whom, or with what. The single most famous assemblage shows the pattern in concentrated form. In 1890, guaqueros opened two tombs at the site of La Soledad, near Filandia in what is now Quindío, and took from them cremated remains in urns together with a great hoard of gold. From the larger find a selection — long given as a hundred and twenty-odd pieces — was bought in 1891 by the Colombian president Carlos Holguín. Shown at the 1892 Madrid exposition marking the fourth centenary of Columbus’s landfall, the collection was handed in 1893 to Spain’s Queen Regent María Cristina, in gratitude for her arbitration of a border dispute between Colombia and Venezuela. The hundred and twenty-two pieces of the Tesoro Quimbaya have remained in Madrid, in the Museo de América, ever since.

That gift has not held in the way a gift is meant to. In 2017 Colombia’s Constitutional Court ruled that the treasure had been given away unconstitutionally and ordered the state to seek its return; formal restitution requests have followed, and the legal case over the Filandia collection is now argued in the language of cultural-property law. The objects keep moving — out of a tomb in the Cauca highlands, into a president’s hands, across an ocean to a museum case, and now into a courtroom. A poporo cast to be sealed forever beside one person’s ashes has become a thing argued over between two states, its grey alloy heart still wearing the gold the smith brought up to color a millennium and a half ago, and the long road of that journey is the truest measure of how far such an object can travel from the dark it was made for.