Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (6 March 1912 – 17 May 1994 ) was an Austrian anthropologist and archaeologist.

He is known for his fieldwork among many different Amerindian cultures such as in the Amazonian tropical rainforests (e.g. Desana Tucano), and also among dozens of other indigenous groups in Colombia in the Caribbean Coast (such as the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta), as well as others living in the Pacific Coast, Llanos Orientales, and in the Andean and inter-Andean regions (Muisca) as well as in other areas of Colombia, and he also did research on campesino societies.

For nearly six decades he advanced ethnographic and anthropological studies, as well as archeological research, and as a scholar was a prolific writer and public figure renowned as a staunch defender of indigenous peoples.

Reichel-Dolmatoff has worked with other archaeologists and anthropologists such as Marianne Cardale de Schrimpff, Ana María Groot, Gonzalo Correal Urrego and others.

Reichel was born in 1912 in Salzburg, then part of Austria-Hungary, as son of the artist Carl Anton Reichel and Hilde Constance Dolmatoff.

Oriented in the classics (Latin and Greek) he did most of his high school at the Benedictine school of Kremsmunster in Austria.

He attended classes at the Faculté des Lettres of the Sorbonne and in the École du Louvre from late 1937 to 1938.

Reichel emigrated to Colombia in 1939, where he became a Colombian citizen in 1942.

In a trip to the upper Meta River in the Orinoco plains in 1940, he conducted research and later published the earliest studies done on the Guahibo Indians.

Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote a two volume monography of the Kogi Indians 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 descendants, the Kogui, also known as the Kogi or Kaggaba, and also worked with the Arhuaco and Wiwa indigenous groups, as well as ethnography of a peasant community among the people of Aritama (Kankuamo).

Reichel-Dolmatoff carried out a regional study of the area covering archeology, ethnohistory and anthropology, making it one of the first such regional studies made in Colombia.

Reichel also did research in the Pacific coast and studied amongst others the Kuna of the Caiman Nuevo River, west of the Gulf of Urabá.

Several years later, Reichel published ethnohistorical studies and anthropological research related to the Kogi, demonstrating their connections to ancestral Tairona chiefdoms.

Reichel became member and was the Secretary to the Free France Movement (1942-1943) with the help of his colleague and friend the French ethnologist Paul Rivet who was the Delegate of the Resistance of France Libre and living in Colombia.

General Charles De Gaulle later awarded Reichel-Dolmatoff with the medal of the Ordre national du Mérite.

Reichel-Dolmatoff spent the rest of his life in research in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, ethnoecology, ethnohistory, ethnoastronomy, material culture, art, and vernacular architecture, among others.

Reichel-Dolmatoff developed a keen interest for conducting fieldwork which would take him and his studies throughout the country, the Caribbean area, La Guajira desert, the Chocó rainforests, the Llanos Orientales, to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Amazon rainforests.

Some of Reichel-Dolmatoff's archeological research was essential in creating the basic chronological framework for most of the Colombian area, and is still used today.

In 1943 Gerardo wrote his first article on the Muisca settlement of Soacha.

That same year, together with his wife anthropologist and archeologist Alicia Dussán, he conducted an analysis on pre-Columbian burial urns of the Magdalena River.

Working in the Tolima region inhabited by Amerindians and the 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 their ancestral territories.

Switching residency to the city of Santa Marta in 1946, the Reichel-Dolmatoffs created and headed the Instituto Etnologico del Magdalena in 1945 and created also a small museum about the anthropology and archeology of the Sierra Nevada region.

In the late 1950s, Reichel and his family moved to the coastal city of Cartagena.

Reichel 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, in 1954, the Reichel-Dolmatoffs located and also excavated, amongst others, the Barlovento site, which was the first early Formative shell-midden site found in Colombia.

At Momil, they conducted the first study of societies engaged in a subsistence change from shifting cultivation (manioc) to corn agriculturalists.

After returning to live in Bogotá in 1960 Reichel was the founder, professor, and first Chair the first Department of Anthropology in Colombia.

Reichel did archeological excavations at the site of Puerto Hormiga where they discovered the earliest dated pottery in all of the New World (at that time), -dated 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 as had been formerly suggested by other archeologists) .(Reichel see biblio).

Reichel also excavated in other sites including in San Agustin, Huila.

He published his analyses of the Puerto Hormiga site regarding early Formative cultures, and of the San Agustin site regarding chiefdoms.

Reichel also produced one of the first overviews of Colombian archeology and proposed an interpretive framework of its millenarian pre-historic past.

During the 1960s and until the mid-1990s Reichel-Dolmatoff advanced research on Amerindian shamanism, indigenous modes of life, ethnoecology, and on cosmologies and worldviews, and he also did research on hallucinogens related to shamanism, entheogens, ethnoastronomy, ethnobotany, ethnozoology, and on the vernacular architecture of temples and of the Amazonian 'maloca' longhouses; additionally he did research on the shamanic symbolism of pre-Columbian goldwork, as well as other Amerindian artifacts and material culture, including basketry.

Reichel-Dolmatoff was a member of the Colombian Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Associate Member of the NAS National Academy of Sciences of the United States and he was also a member of the Academia Real Española de Ciencias.

In 1963, Reichel and his wife taught courses in anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes, and then in 1964 formally created the first Department of Anthropology in Colombia at the university in Bogotá.

Reichel-Dolmatoff worked for 5 years at the Department and left together with his wife and several other professors due to changes in the Department.

Reichel received a short visiting fellowship to Cambridge University in 1970 and became an adjunct professor at the Anthropology Department of the University of California in Los Angeles.

He was awarded the Thomas H. Huxley medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1975.

Reichel-Dolmatoff was the single author of 40 books and of over 400 articles, all dedicated to the archeology and anthropology of Colombia and specifically highlighting the relevance of indigenous peoples of the past and present.

He died 17 May 1994 in Colombia.