complex of the nation (the result of its mixed cultural legacy) and sought inspiration and values in Colombia’s autochtonous, Indo-American ancestry. Among these intellectuals was Gregorio Hernández de Alba, who was commissioned by the Ministry of Education (formerly the Ministry of Public Instruction), along with the Spanish archaeologist José Pérez de Barradas, to carry out excavations in San Agustín in 1937. The following year, under the same ministry, he created the National Archaeological Service to study and protect the pre-Columbian past and to exert control and provide technical assistance in that regard. Although its aims were ambitious and its economic resources and personnel modest, the service managed to cover a lot of ground and carry out multiple and diverse activities. Under its aegis the archaeological parks in San Agustín and Tierradentro were created. They had been set up by legislation in 1931 and 1935 that gave the state the power to acquire land for the purpose; and each park now boasted a park warden! Legislation passed in 1931 that ordered the foundation of a specialized museum in ethnology and archaeology was actualized in 1938, as the result of an exhibition to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the city of Bogotá. This provided an excuse to incorporate the old National Museum collection, to attract donations, and to obtain extra funds to buy private collections.

The Archaeological Service offered lectures for the general public and for schoolchildren, and it established contacts and exchanges with universities and scientific centers outside the country, especially in France and the United States. The last and most important of all these new initiatives was the publication of the journal Bulletin of the Archaeological Museum, established in 1943 and replaced two years later by the Bulletin of Archaeology.

Into this very fertile ground in Colombia European intellectuals and exiles from the Spanish civil war and Nazism were welcomed. Many married Colombians and settled in and worked for the country for the rest of their lives. Austrian-born Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, the archaeologist best known internationally, was part of this group.

By 1939 specialized courses in anthropology and archaeology were taught in the recently established Social Sciences Section of the Teacher’s Training College (Escuela Normal Superior) under the supervision of the German professor Justus W. Schottelius. Shortly afterward the National Ethnological Institute was founded under Paul Rivet (the director of the Museum of Man in Paris who had fled occupied France). This organization provided training for professionals prepared to carry out basic research in archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and ethnology rather than specializing in any one field. Rivet believed that in a rapidly developing country where many indigenous cultures and archaeological sites were about to disappear without trace, it was vital to get researchers into the field as quickly as possible and for them to have a broad range of skills. Rivet’s best-known work, The Origins of American Man, combined diffusionism with the ideas from the cultural-history school, and, for better or worse, this became the orientation of his and following generations of Colombians (see Gnecco 1995 for a withering critique).

The new institution had financial backing from the French government for many years, and it not only encouraged young researchers but also provided modest financing and even a new venue for publishing results: the Review of the National Ethnological Institute. Luis Duque Gómez, Julio César Cubillos, and Eliécer Silva Célis began systematic surveys of different regions and published detailed excavation reports. Alicia Dussán, the most remarkable of the first generation of Colombian women archaeologists (working side by side with her husband, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff), started to explore the northern Atlantic lowlands. Together they spent the next decades on research projects that ranged from the discovery of one of the earliest examples of pottery in the Americas (Puerto Hormiga, dated to approximately 3500 b.c.) to excavations at early formative sites and at precontact villages and small towns with stone architecture in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta. As part of the Yale Archaeological Expedition Wendell C. Bennet surveyed museum and private collections and published, in English, the