Aside from the friar’s recounting of his travels, little antiquarian material has been found thus far in the documents of the eighteenth century. This may be due to a lack of interest on the part of archaeologists, many of whom consider that their period of study ends with the sixteenth century; for them, although the seventeenth century might be of faint interest, the eighteenth is more or less outside their boundaries. This situation is beginning to change, partly because historians are demanding that archaeologists resolve certain questions that documents cannot address. In 1983 an earthquake destroyed much of Popayán, one of the few towns that had maintained a well-preserved colonial urban center, and exposed the foundations of many ancient buildings, thereby opening up a rich field for archaeological investigations.

The final years of the eighteenth century marked the beginning of institutionalized scientific activity. A rising demand in Old World markets for certain products of the American colonies may account for the particular orientation of this interest. King Charles III of Spain ordered botanical expeditions to be organized in mexico, peru, and New Granada, the last being undertaken by José Celestino Mutis. This Spanish savant managed to attract a group of young and enthusiastic local intellectuals to join his ambitious endeavor, and for decades they carried out extensive fieldwork, collecting botanical speciments and various kinds of samples and information as their interests extended into the fauna and other natural resources and the customs of the land. Within this framework Francisco José de Caldas, an astronomer and geographer, visited San Agustín in 1779 and recognized its stone statues as the product of a former Indian population and work that ought to be studied properly.

The enthusiasm of the expedition members was enlivened by the 1801 arrival of Baron Alexander von Humboldt, a German naturalist and explorer whose antiquarian interests and descriptions ranged from petroglyphs in the Orinoco River basin to the Muisca and their legend of a chieftain covered in gold dust (el dorado) who used to throw golden offerings into a sacred lake. Humboldt had accepted the calendar hypothesis of Fr. José Domingo Duquesne, who had described one elaborately engraved Muisca stone as a calendar and taken it as proof that this group had achieved a degree of civilization comparable to that of Mesoamerican societies. Although the calendar hypothesis was subsequently proved wrong, Humboldt’s prestige helped to legitimize the Indian past in the intellectual milieu of the time. As part of the New Granada upper class, the expedition’s scientists were affected by current philosophical trends from the aftermath of the French Revolution, and they were active in organizing a revolt against Spanish rule. With the wars of independence the expedition came to an end, not least because some of its members, such as the great Caldas, paid for their political activism with their lives.

Soon after the achievement of political independence in the 1820s, attempts were made to rebuild what had been destroyed, including the effort to replace dead scientists with foreign ones. The Mining School was created along with the National History Museum (which brought in Jean Baptiste Boussingault, an expert in mines) and, in 1824, the National Museum, among whose exhibits was a Muisca mummy. However, political independence did little to change the country’s social and geographic profile: the upper-class, landed Granadian aristocracy replaced the Spaniards in the higher echelons of civil, military, and religious administration; slavery continued in a modified way; and a hierarchy with castelike nuances placed tribal Indians and peasants of mainly indigenous and African ancestry in the bottom social ranks. The country was made up of culturally differentiated provinces, poorly integrated and isolated by rugged geography. During the nineteenth century the republican government was involved in an ongoing quest for an appropriate political organization, resulting in eight constitutional changes that were invariably preceded or followed by civil wars.

Most notable during the second and third decades of the nineteenth century were the visits and memoirs of various European travelers whose interest in Colombia had been sparked by Baron von Humboldt. Boussingault visited San