When constructing the defensive system, the Romans took advantage of the difficult terrain between the Roman towns of Tarsatica (Rijeka in northwestern Croatia), Tergeste (Trieste in northeastern Italy), Emona (Ljubljana in central Slovenia), and Forum Iulii (Cividale in northeastern Italy). The defensive system aimed at controlling all land routes and passages from the Balkans to Italy, and it consisted of a series of barrier walls in valleys and signal towers, small fortifications, and castella, or forts, which were built using prehistoric and early Roman constructions. As an organized military system, it belongs to the third and fourth century a.d., but some parts were used later as well.

Bojan Djuric

References

Šašel, J., and P. Petru, eds. 1971. Claustra Alpium Iuliarum. Ljubljana: Fontes.

Colombia

Among the most important sources for modern Colombian archaeologists are the writings of the Spanish conquistadores. The documents left by these soldiers, priests, administrators, and specially appointed chroniclers of the Indies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are used in various ways: to complement the later periods of local or regional archaeological sequences, as a tool for interpreting the function or significance of archaeological sites or aspects of culture, and, finally, in conjunction with twentieth-century ethnographic studies used to build evolutionary type classifications of cultures. Perhaps that is why the sixteenth century is taken as a starting point by some of the authors who have dealt at length with the history of the discipline (Duque 1965, 1967, 1970; Burcher 1985; Londoño 1989; Uribe 1979; Jaramillo 1994). The works of these authors are the main sources for this entry.

A number of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers—the priest Juan de Castellanos in his Elegies of Illustrious Men of the Indies, Friar Pedro Simón in his Historical Notices of the Conquests of Terra Firme in the West Indies, and Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita, author of the General History of the New Kingdom of Granada—had antiquarian interests. Their writings included discussions of the peopling of the new continent and of related factors such as changes in sea level. The importance of their work, however, is somewhat diluted by the unavoidable biblical frame of reference, for some of them were convinced that American Indians were the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel. (Unless otherwise stated, Spanish is the original language of the publications and journals mentioned in this entry; full bibliographical details can be found in Bernal [1970], Enciso and Therrien [1996], and Bermeo [1990]).

The systematic looting of Indian tombs was one way in which the Spaniards obtained the gold that they coveted and that was the driving force behind the conquest. Means of recognizing tombs by marks on the surface and ways of distinguishing rich graves from poorer ones were frequently described; in his Historical Compilation, for example, Friar Pedro de Aguado described the rich tombs of the lower Sinú River basin as well as those of the Muisca area, in the upland plateau of the Eastern Cordillera (a mountain range).

Early on, the Spanish crown issued laws to ensure its share of the profits from the looting of shrines and tombs, and lawsuits and quarrels between crown and church over the possession of gold idols obtained in these places were not infrequent. Regrettably tomb looters remained a step ahead of antiquaries and later archaeologists during the centuries that followed. This was the case with San Agustín in the upper reaches of the Magdalena River, the country’s most famous archaeological region, through which the Spaniards passed in the sixteenth century. At that point monolithic sculpture was already a feature of the past, and the statues, within artificial mounds, were not visible. By the eighteenth century, when Friar Juan de Santa Gertrudis visited the region, looting had started. His Marvels of Nature was the first written account of the region, although he described monuments as images of Catholic religious dignitaries “sculpted by the devil.” He traveled extensively in the southwestern part of New Granada (as the country was known by that time) and wrote about the ancient burials of various parts of it.