modern departments of Caldas, Quindío, and Risaralda. These regions, which were densely populated until the sixteenth century, were depopulated by the conquest. Between 1840 and 1895 settlers from northern Antioquia moved back into the area in increasing numbers, attracted by the richness of its prehispanic tombs—particularly those that yielded items of the Quimbaya gold style in Quindío. Some of these new finds of pottery and other materials were sold to collectors. The best known of these individuals was Leocadio María Arango, who founded a private museum in Medellín, considered by the French traveler Pierre D’Espagnat in 1897 to be much superior to the display of aboriginal antiques at the National Museum in Bogotá. Another well-known collector in Antioquia was Vicente Restrepo, a historian and author of The Chibcha [Muisca] before the Spanish Conquest. He was also a metallurgist and a partner in a photographic studio that produced visiting cards that featured illustrations of pre-Columbian gold pieces together with other more conventionally fashionable motifs.

By the beginning of the 1880s the Ministry of Public Education issued a circular letter requesting the donation of objects (which were now referred to as archaeological works rather than antiquities) to the National Museum. A revival of scientific interest resulted in a new state-sponsored venture, the Comisión Permanente. For the first time pre-Columbian antiquities as objects of study had the same status as plants, rocks, minerals, and animals; and ethnological questions were considered relevant to the history of the republic. Jorge Isaacs (better known as a poet and novelist) was part of the commission, and after its dissolution he continued to travel to and study the Atlantic coastal region and parts of the adjacent Sierra Nevada; he became increasingly interested in indigenous groups and prehispanic objects, explaining the latter in terms of the former in his Study of the Tribes of [the State of] Magdalena.

These early collections attracted the attention of European scholars. Some artifacts had made their way overseas to museums and into private collections and were available for study. (The acquisition process was begun by the museums in 1849 and was pursued more actively after 1870.) Goldwork was particularly appealing, and it was studied by a number of scholars (see Londoño 1989). The first Congress of Americanists was held in 1875, and papers on the archaeology of Colombia were read at this and subsequent congresses. For the eleventh congress, held in 1892 (the year of the four-hundredth anniversary of the first European contact with America), various scholars read papers on the archaeology of Colombia. Among them was Soledad Acosta de Samper, the daughter of the Joaquín mentioned earlier and the only woman antiquarian of the nineteenth century. At the congress she read a paper on “The Aboriginal Populations of the Territories Which Today Form the Republic of Colombia at the Time of the Discovery of América.” Ernesto Restrepo Tirado (son of the Vicente mentioned earlier) published Studies on the Aborigines of Colombia and An Ethnographical and Archaeological Essay on the Province of the Quimbayas and years later wrote his History of the Province of Santa Marta, the outcome of research conducted at the National Archive in Bogotá and the General Archive of the Indies in Seville, Spain.

Spain celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary with an exhibition on the history of the Americas. One participant, Colombia, exhibited a set of remarkably beautiful pre-Columbian gold items from the Quindío region, known as the Quimbaya Treasure, and several private collections. The latter were subsequently on display in the Universal Exhibition of Chicago in 1893, but the Quimbaya Treasure was presented to the Queen Regent of Spain in gratitude for diplomatic services rendered, and she passed it on to the Archaeological Museum of Madrid. Many twentieth-century Colombians were greatly chagrined by this donation because the Quimbaya Treasure was placed in a Spanish rather than a Colombian museum; the treasure has since become a symbol of the loss of many other aspects of national heritage to foreign collectors and museums due to a lack of interest on the part of government officials.

Paradoxically, although antiquarian studies during the second part of the nineteenth century increased in importance and acquired independent