Agustín; a captain named Cochrane dug a number of Muisca tombs in the area around Guatavita, with what was apparently an antiquarian interest; and John P. Hamilton referred to various unsuccesful attempts, dating from colonial times, to drain the lake that contained the El Dorado treasure. Auguste Le Moyne, a French diplomat, recorded how many Granadians dug up ancient tombs in search of treasure, and he described the the colorful lore that developed around this activity. A decree issued in 1833 gave the discoverers of Indian tombs and temples rights over them, thus stimulating tomb looting.

Antiquarian interests managed to survive through the efforts of individuals such as Manuel Vélez, a collector and keen observer of finds in the provinces of Cundinamarca (on the upland plateau surrounding Bogotá) and Antioquia. In a letter to Boussingault, first published in 1847 in the Bulletin of the French Geographical Society, Vélez proposed a new interpretation of these finds. He believed that they were not, as was commonly thought, the products of barbarians who deserved to be conquered and catechized in the sixteenth century. Instead, he argued, they were the products of rich, powerful, and perhaps even civilized groups. He hypothesized that these superior nations had vanished before the conquest. In 1848 Gen. Joaquín Acosta published the Historical Compendium of the Discovery and Colonization of New Granada, in which the Muisca and other sixteenth-century populations were given as much importance as the entries on the Spanish conquerors.

A renewal of scientific interest was triggered by plans for further integration of the republic into world markets. It was again felt that the information available on human and natural resources was far from adequate for the task, so a new expedition, geographic this time—the Comisión Corográfica—was launched in 1850. At the same time, various academic institutions were created, and others, such as the National Museum, were improved. Although the expedition lasted less than a decade, its achievements were many in a number of scientific fields, and pre-Columbian remains were recorded and drawn. Agustín Codazzi, an Italian geographer, was the expedition’s director and carried out what can be described as the first systematic study of San Agustín, comprising an illustrated catalog of the statues, a properly surveyed plan of their location (and of the area), and an interpretation of their meaning. Codazzi believed that the San Agustín monuments were religious in nature and that the statues were not isolated pieces but part of a building or structure. Another member of the expedition, Manuel Ancízar, had the task of describing the customs of the different races making up the population of the Eastern Cordillera, together with the ancient monuments and natural curiosities of this region.

The most notable contribution at this time was that of Ezequiel Uricoechea, an accomplished naturalist and philologist whose interests extended to ethnology and the study of Muisca goldwork. In his Memoirs of Neogranadian Antiques, published in Berlin in 1854 and perhaps the first book that could be called an archaeological text, he described the archaeology of the middle Cauca Valley, but his main emphasis was on the technology of Muisca votive figures. This same emphasis on the Muisca characterizes the work of Liborio Zerda; his interest was prompted by Adolf Bastian, who had visited the country in search of Indian antiquities on behalf of the Berlin Ethnographical Museum. Zerda’s contri butions to journals in 1883 were published as El Dorado: A Historical, Ethnological and Archaeological Study of the Chibcha [Muisca], and for the first time the historical base of the legend was outlined. The 1860s and 1870s were remarkable for the attention that was paid, between civil wars, to cultural heritage. In 1865 the first legal guidelines for the protection of monuments were issued, and the National Museum was attached to the newly organized but short-lived Institute of National Arts and Sciences before being transferred, in 1867, to the recently founded National University.

By the 1870s interest in another region was increasing. In 1871 Andres Posada Arango presented his Essay on the Aboriginal Cultures of the State of Antioquia in Colombia to the French Anthropological Society. In 1885 Manuel Uribe Angel published the General Geography and Historical Compendium of the State of Antioquia in Paris. At this time Antioquia comprised the