Recommended listening: José Antonio Escobar - Guitar Music of Colombia
Story
At the northwest tip of South America, where the Andes meet the Caribbean, a city stood proudly above the clouds. Emerging from the heavy jungle of the cloud forest, it was built on a narrow ridge 1150 meters up in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range in the world. From this vantage point, it overlooked the Buritaca River and its rich valley. The city was known as Teyuna and is still called that today by its inhabitants' descendants. It's better known by its Spanish name Ciudad Perdida, "The Lost City", since it remained unknown to outsiders until looters happened upon it in the 1970s.
At its height many centuries ago, Teyuna was home to the Indigenous people known as the Tairona. Its rulers directed massive amounts of labour to quarry stone and bring it to this lofty locale. From up here they could monitor and control trade that passed between the mountains, the rainforest and the sea. Teyuna was home to thousands of people, but maintaining a city of this size so high up in the mountains was no simple task. Erosion was a serious problem in this environment. The Tairona, however, were more than up to the task of combating it. They cleared away swathes of the rainforest and engineered flat terraces for housing and agriculture, then built irrigation canals alongside the stairs connecting them. Water trickled down in a controlled flow, greatly mitigating the risk of erosion damage. It also allowed them to cultivate a wide variety of crops. Corn, beans, cassava, soursop, pineapples, guava, avocados - all were grown in carefully managed terraces that cascaded down from the mountaintop cities. They also tended particular palm plants, which they used for building houses, tools and weapons. Other Tairona people lived on the coast, and so the people of the mountain cities exchanged crops and game for their seafood, using their dense network of roads and bridges to reach each other.
But food wasn't the only thing the Tairona traded. More than anything, the Tairona have gone down in history for one thing: Gold. It was gold that drew the Spanish conquistadors to their well guarded cities, and gold that drew looters up the crumbling staircases of a forgotten metropolis. The Tairona were master goldsmiths and had abundant access to gold from the territories they controlled in northern Colombia. They produced a type of alloy known as tumbaga which combined copper and gold. By varying the gold to copper ratio, they produced metalworks in a variety of colours. Pink tumbaga was also made by a process of de-gilding objects. The Tairona sometimes meticulously polished away the top layer of gold to reveal a pink layer underneath. This technique may have symbolized that an object underwent a change in ownership, or that a significant life stage like puberty may have been reached. It's also been hypothesized that such objects were more closely associated with women, since the association of pink and red with women's physical involvement in childbirth and menstruation is a deep-seated one in Indigenous Colombia.
Very little is known about the role of women among the Tairona. One Spanish chronicler wrote that while most of the villages were ruled by semi-autonomous male caciques, there was one village with a female cacica. The details are too sparse to know whether she ruled in her own right or was perhaps the powerful widow of a former cacique. Their contemporaries further south in Colombia, the Sinú, spoke a related language and did have female chiefs, so it's possible the Tairona did too. Among the Tairona's modern descendants like the Kogi, women do not hold prominent leadership roles at all, since the Kogi are ruled by the male priestly class. Interestingly though, a change in the material culture around the year 1000 suggests that women may have previously played a more significant part in Tairona culture. The earliest phase of Tairona archaeology is known as the Nahuange phase. Like the later Classic Tairona, the Nahuange made many humanoid figurines of gold and ceramics. However, the Nahuange predominantly depicted women. Female representations start to rapidly decline as the Nahuange culture transitions into the Classic Tairona. They did still appear sometimes in Tairona art, usually performing domestic tasks, making offerings, or engaging in adventurous sexual liaisons. But their importance as standalone, authoritative figurines eventually vanished. Was this change in material culture a sign that the role of women in society was changing for the worse? Or was it merely an artistic change that had little impact on women's day to day lives?
One thing that Spanish accounts do go into more detail about is that Tairona women had access to the finest adornments. Men and women both wore earrings, labrets, nose piercings, and large round pectoral plates. Women also wore bracelets on their wrists and hanging figurines from their chests. The Spanish claim that people of all classes wore gold, even the poor. They also had cotton skirts and mantles and colourful feather headdresses. One chronicler even said that "when they walk, they carry fans made of feathers and palm leaves." During the special festival at the time of the corn harvest, the women would wear white and dance. While the featherwork and textiles do not survive, much of the goldwork does, leaving us a glimpse of how Tairona women beautified themselves. Gold also had a religious significance as it was believed to reflect and embody the sun god's brilliance. The Tairona's descendants, the Kogi, still use some Tairona golden artefacts in their own religious practices.
In this illustration, two women walk down the stairs in a calm neighbourhood of Teyuna. The woman on our left is festooned in brilliant tumbaga pieces. Her high status jewellery and feathers suggest that she is the cacica herself, proceeding at a leisurely pace as she fans herself in the jungle heat. The other woman is of a lower status, although she still wears gold jewellery. She is balancing a jug of water on her head with well-practiced ease. Behind them, a stone terrace rises up into the rainforest with a house made of palm branches sitting atop it. There is very little about their lives that we can recover today. But thousands of women just like them walked up and down the stairs of Teyuna for centuries, making their home high up in the jungle.
At its height many centuries ago, Teyuna was home to the Indigenous people known as the Tairona. Its rulers directed massive amounts of labour to quarry stone and bring it to this lofty locale. From up here they could monitor and control trade that passed between the mountains, the rainforest and the sea. Teyuna was home to thousands of people, but maintaining a city of this size so high up in the mountains was no simple task. Erosion was a serious problem in this environment. The Tairona, however, were more than up to the task of combating it. They cleared away swathes of the rainforest and engineered flat terraces for housing and agriculture, then built irrigation canals alongside the stairs connecting them. Water trickled down in a controlled flow, greatly mitigating the risk of erosion damage. It also allowed them to cultivate a wide variety of crops. Corn, beans, cassava, soursop, pineapples, guava, avocados - all were grown in carefully managed terraces that cascaded down from the mountaintop cities. They also tended particular palm plants, which they used for building houses, tools and weapons. Other Tairona people lived on the coast, and so the people of the mountain cities exchanged crops and game for their seafood, using their dense network of roads and bridges to reach each other.
But food wasn't the only thing the Tairona traded. More than anything, the Tairona have gone down in history for one thing: Gold. It was gold that drew the Spanish conquistadors to their well guarded cities, and gold that drew looters up the crumbling staircases of a forgotten metropolis. The Tairona were master goldsmiths and had abundant access to gold from the territories they controlled in northern Colombia. They produced a type of alloy known as tumbaga which combined copper and gold. By varying the gold to copper ratio, they produced metalworks in a variety of colours. Pink tumbaga was also made by a process of de-gilding objects. The Tairona sometimes meticulously polished away the top layer of gold to reveal a pink layer underneath. This technique may have symbolized that an object underwent a change in ownership, or that a significant life stage like puberty may have been reached. It's also been hypothesized that such objects were more closely associated with women, since the association of pink and red with women's physical involvement in childbirth and menstruation is a deep-seated one in Indigenous Colombia.
Very little is known about the role of women among the Tairona. One Spanish chronicler wrote that while most of the villages were ruled by semi-autonomous male caciques, there was one village with a female cacica. The details are too sparse to know whether she ruled in her own right or was perhaps the powerful widow of a former cacique. Their contemporaries further south in Colombia, the Sinú, spoke a related language and did have female chiefs, so it's possible the Tairona did too. Among the Tairona's modern descendants like the Kogi, women do not hold prominent leadership roles at all, since the Kogi are ruled by the male priestly class. Interestingly though, a change in the material culture around the year 1000 suggests that women may have previously played a more significant part in Tairona culture. The earliest phase of Tairona archaeology is known as the Nahuange phase. Like the later Classic Tairona, the Nahuange made many humanoid figurines of gold and ceramics. However, the Nahuange predominantly depicted women. Female representations start to rapidly decline as the Nahuange culture transitions into the Classic Tairona. They did still appear sometimes in Tairona art, usually performing domestic tasks, making offerings, or engaging in adventurous sexual liaisons. But their importance as standalone, authoritative figurines eventually vanished. Was this change in material culture a sign that the role of women in society was changing for the worse? Or was it merely an artistic change that had little impact on women's day to day lives?
One thing that Spanish accounts do go into more detail about is that Tairona women had access to the finest adornments. Men and women both wore earrings, labrets, nose piercings, and large round pectoral plates. Women also wore bracelets on their wrists and hanging figurines from their chests. The Spanish claim that people of all classes wore gold, even the poor. They also had cotton skirts and mantles and colourful feather headdresses. One chronicler even said that "when they walk, they carry fans made of feathers and palm leaves." During the special festival at the time of the corn harvest, the women would wear white and dance. While the featherwork and textiles do not survive, much of the goldwork does, leaving us a glimpse of how Tairona women beautified themselves. Gold also had a religious significance as it was believed to reflect and embody the sun god's brilliance. The Tairona's descendants, the Kogi, still use some Tairona golden artefacts in their own religious practices.
In this illustration, two women walk down the stairs in a calm neighbourhood of Teyuna. The woman on our left is festooned in brilliant tumbaga pieces. Her high status jewellery and feathers suggest that she is the cacica herself, proceeding at a leisurely pace as she fans herself in the jungle heat. The other woman is of a lower status, although she still wears gold jewellery. She is balancing a jug of water on her head with well-practiced ease. Behind them, a stone terrace rises up into the rainforest with a house made of palm branches sitting atop it. There is very little about their lives that we can recover today. But thousands of women just like them walked up and down the stairs of Teyuna for centuries, making their home high up in the jungle.
Artist's Comments
This illustration took me a long time to do, but it was really good to finally push through the art block I'd been having with another piece and work on this one instead. I have mixed feelings about how all the colours turned out - stone is not easy to figure out how to colour! And the tumbaga effect of mixing pink with gold ended up blending in more with their skin than I imagined, since I imagined it glinting in the light more strongly. But I really liked learning all about the Tairona for this one. The cacica is based on this figurine and the water bearer is based on this one. Thank you to everyone who helped me when I was struggling while working on this piece. ~ October 8, 2021
Resources
Want to learn more about the Tairona? Here are some recommended resources.
Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia ed. Jeffrey Quilter and John W. Hoopes
There are a lot of great chapters in this book dealing with Tairona art. One that I found particularly helpful in my research for this illustration was Warwick Bray's chapter "Gold, Stone, and Ideology: Symbols of Power in the Tairona Tradition of Northern Colombia". It was in that chapter that I learned of the reference to a cacica among the early colonial Tairona. Bray quotes and analyzes several different primary source references to Tairona clothing and adornment. While highlighting the importance of the Nahuange tradition in early Classic Tairona, he points out that Tairona imagery is dominated by male figures while the Nahuange is dominated by female. There is also an extended discussion of the role of Tairona artifacts in Kogi rituals today.
"Depletion gilding, innovation and life-histories: the changing colours of Nahuange metalwork" by Juanita Sáenz-Semper and Marcos Martinón-Torres
The authors of this article look at the significance of Nahuange metalwork where the gold had been polished away to reveal the copper underneath. This leads to a pinkish hue. Based on ethnographic evidence of Indigenous Colombian peoples, the authors speculate that the pink items may be connected to women through associations between red, women, and the course of human life. They connect this to the fact that representations of human beings in Nahuange artwork are predominantly female. There are parallels here with the Sinú (Zenú), who lived in Colombia at the same time as the Nahuange and Tairona and also demonstrate a link between women and metalwork.
"Late Pre-Hispanic Chiefdoms of Northern Colombia and the Formation of Anthropogenic Landscapes" by Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo
This book chapter looks at the Tairona and the Sinú (Zenú). I based my drawing of Ciudad Perdida on photographs from this chapter. Oyuela-Caycedo gives a great overview of how and when the Tairona moved into the most remote parts of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and how they engineered the landscape to be hospitable for human habitation.
"Lost Kingdoms of South America, Episode 3: Lands of Gold" on YouTube
If you'd like to watch a documentary in English that covers the Tairona, this is a pretty good one available for free on YouTube. Archaeologist Jago Cooper talks in the first half about the Muisca and in the second half about the Tairona. He visits Ciudad Perdida, Pueblito, and a modern Kogi village. The visuals are pretty stunning. A Spanish dubbed version is also available for free. A good shorter overview of the Tairona is available in Spanish in this video.
Museo del Oro
The Gold Museum in Bogotá has a huge collection of Tairona artifacts. It used to be legal for looters to sell artifacts to the museum, so many of the pieces are poorly provenanced. However, it includes some of the finest examples of Tairona art. The museum has a video online where you can hear two Tairona ocarinas being played, among many other informational videos on their channel.
"Vídeo Tairona - MAPUKA - Uninorte" on YouTube
This charming animated video takes you through daily life for a Tairona family. I really like how they bring the archaeological sites to life and how they show the family interacting. The creators of this video decided to use modern Kogi outfits and bags for the attire of the Tairona, whereas I followed the Tairona figurines quite closely. The reality might be somewhere in between since textiles aren't often portrayed on the figurines, but we know the Tairona had them.
Tairona Heritage Trust
This is a charity that aims to support the environmental and cultural protection work of the modern Kogi. Their stated aim is to elevate the voices of the Kogi, help them protect their culture and lands, and learn from them about environmental management. On this website you can also learn more about the two documentaries the Kogi have participated in making as part of their goal to educate the rest of the planet's people ("Younger Brother") about environmental issues.
Gold and Power in Ancient Costa Rica, Panama, and Colombia ed. Jeffrey Quilter and John W. Hoopes
There are a lot of great chapters in this book dealing with Tairona art. One that I found particularly helpful in my research for this illustration was Warwick Bray's chapter "Gold, Stone, and Ideology: Symbols of Power in the Tairona Tradition of Northern Colombia". It was in that chapter that I learned of the reference to a cacica among the early colonial Tairona. Bray quotes and analyzes several different primary source references to Tairona clothing and adornment. While highlighting the importance of the Nahuange tradition in early Classic Tairona, he points out that Tairona imagery is dominated by male figures while the Nahuange is dominated by female. There is also an extended discussion of the role of Tairona artifacts in Kogi rituals today.
"Depletion gilding, innovation and life-histories: the changing colours of Nahuange metalwork" by Juanita Sáenz-Semper and Marcos Martinón-Torres
The authors of this article look at the significance of Nahuange metalwork where the gold had been polished away to reveal the copper underneath. This leads to a pinkish hue. Based on ethnographic evidence of Indigenous Colombian peoples, the authors speculate that the pink items may be connected to women through associations between red, women, and the course of human life. They connect this to the fact that representations of human beings in Nahuange artwork are predominantly female. There are parallels here with the Sinú (Zenú), who lived in Colombia at the same time as the Nahuange and Tairona and also demonstrate a link between women and metalwork.
"Late Pre-Hispanic Chiefdoms of Northern Colombia and the Formation of Anthropogenic Landscapes" by Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo
This book chapter looks at the Tairona and the Sinú (Zenú). I based my drawing of Ciudad Perdida on photographs from this chapter. Oyuela-Caycedo gives a great overview of how and when the Tairona moved into the most remote parts of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and how they engineered the landscape to be hospitable for human habitation.
"Lost Kingdoms of South America, Episode 3: Lands of Gold" on YouTube
If you'd like to watch a documentary in English that covers the Tairona, this is a pretty good one available for free on YouTube. Archaeologist Jago Cooper talks in the first half about the Muisca and in the second half about the Tairona. He visits Ciudad Perdida, Pueblito, and a modern Kogi village. The visuals are pretty stunning. A Spanish dubbed version is also available for free. A good shorter overview of the Tairona is available in Spanish in this video.
Museo del Oro
The Gold Museum in Bogotá has a huge collection of Tairona artifacts. It used to be legal for looters to sell artifacts to the museum, so many of the pieces are poorly provenanced. However, it includes some of the finest examples of Tairona art. The museum has a video online where you can hear two Tairona ocarinas being played, among many other informational videos on their channel.
"Vídeo Tairona - MAPUKA - Uninorte" on YouTube
This charming animated video takes you through daily life for a Tairona family. I really like how they bring the archaeological sites to life and how they show the family interacting. The creators of this video decided to use modern Kogi outfits and bags for the attire of the Tairona, whereas I followed the Tairona figurines quite closely. The reality might be somewhere in between since textiles aren't often portrayed on the figurines, but we know the Tairona had them.
Tairona Heritage Trust
This is a charity that aims to support the environmental and cultural protection work of the modern Kogi. Their stated aim is to elevate the voices of the Kogi, help them protect their culture and lands, and learn from them about environmental management. On this website you can also learn more about the two documentaries the Kogi have participated in making as part of their goal to educate the rest of the planet's people ("Younger Brother") about environmental issues.