taken seriously and was considered a hobby; moreover, their interests were focused on prehispanic antiquities and the Spanish chronicles. A number of these chronicles were not available in Colombia, either because they were out of print or because they were still archival material. As a result of the enthusiasm of these researchers, however, several of these works were reprinted and important documents were published. Migrations, especially movements of Caribs, and the distribution of traits and prehispanic objects were the subjects that most interested scholars. The emphasis on migrations lent a certain time depth to their views, but there was also a tendency to relate prehispanic objects of any age to sixteenth-century chiefdoms and groups. A regrettable result of inertia, this tendency still survives in many general or popular presentations of Colombian archaeology (see Botiva et al. 1989 for an effort to counteract that tendency).

In 1902 the Academy of History and Antiquities was created under the protection of the state, and the Academy of the History of Antioquia was founded two years later in Medellín. Between 1910 and 1920 the National Museum acquired various large private collections. Despite these changes, however, relatively little archaeological research was conducted in Colombia during this period. To some degree this was the result of the hegemony of the conservative party, strongly backed by the Catholic Church and the landowners, for whom the history of the country started with the introduction of Spanish civilization. These parties attributed the backwardness of the contemporary, mainly rural mestizo population to the degradation of an originally blemished Indian ancestry.

With some exceptions, it was mainly foreign scholars who explored Colombia and discovered the rich variety of regional cultures and styles, in addition to the historically better documented Muisca and Quimbaya. The ever popular San Agustín was chosen by the German archaeologist Konrad Theodor Preuss, who carried out the first systematic archaeological excavations in the area in 1914. He transported a number of the most remarkable statues, carved on huge stone slabs, to the Berlin Ethnographical Museum. As a reaction to this notable feat, pre-Columbian monuments were declared part of the history of the nation in 1918 and placed under the protection of the Ministry of Public Instruction. Two years later there was a ban on taking monuments and objects into public or private ownership outside of Colombia without permission from the Academy of History.

This new legislation did not prevent J. Alden Mason of the Field Museum of National History in the United States from taking, in 1922, a sizable collection of pottery, bone, and stone artifacts from the first archaeological excavations in Pueblito and other Tairona sites in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. However, it did enable the Santa Marta custom authorities to refuse to ship the collection without due permission. A request for permission was rejected by the National Academy of History but later granted by the Ministry of Public Instruction.

Other expeditions included those of Henry Wassén in what is today known as the Calima region and that of Sigvald Linné, who explored the northern Pacific Coast near the Gulf of Urabá. This was part of the king of Belgium’s romantic quest for the site of Santa Maria La Antigua del Darién, the first Spanish settlement in mainland South America. This region was as exotically tropical and remote to Colombian scholars, who were mainly based on the cool highland plateau of Bogotá, as it was to the northern Europeans. Geographic barriers to travel remained largely unconquered well into the twentieth century, and for some regions commercial air transport (organized very early in Colombia) arrived before roads or railways.

In the 1930s the defeat of the conservative party that had governed Colombia for the previous three decades allowed the winning liberal party to carry out its ambitious plan to modernize the country. This effort began at the foundations—with profound changes to agrarian and educational policies. Within the intellectual milieu there was reform in the arts, politics, and social sciences, and the Mexican Revolution and the Indian uprisings in the Cauca region received much attention. Bachué, goddess of the sixteenth-century Muisca pantheon, was chosen as the emblem of a group of intellectuals who wanted to change the prevailing inferiority