The most important event of the 1950s was the establishment of the Gold Museum as a permanent public exhibition. Its origins go back much further. Many years before, the Bank of the Republic, which bought gold from mines as well as pre-Columbian metal items to melt down for the country’s reserves, had begun to preserve some of the most outstanding archaeological items sold to it. In the 1930s the bank actively pursued a policy of acquiring individual objects as well as outstanding private collections to prevent them from being taken out of the country. By 1944 these objects were displayed in a room to which only very distinguished individuals were invited. The bank began to publish books on archaeology and goldwork and to acquire pottery objects as well. By 1959 it housed its museum in a specially designed vault in its main offices at a newly built bank, and entrance was no longer restricted. Two years later ambitious plans for an independent site were under way.

In the 1960s two influential summaries of Colombian archaeology were published internationally and in English. One of these was by Angulo and appeared in Aboriginal Cultural Development in Latin America: An Interpretative Review, edited by Betty Meggers and Clifford Evans (1963). The other was a volume in the series Ancient Peoples and Places, in which Reichel-Dolmatoff (1965) outlined the clearest and most comprehensive interpretation of the country’s pre-Columbian past that has been written to date.

Colombia was enjoying a period of relative peace after its two political parties opted to take turns in power instead of fighting over the next two decades. With severe restrictions on imports, national industry was flourishing, and the international demand for coffee (then Colombia’s main export) was growing. The recently founded, private University of the Andes was training the upper echelons of technicians needed to manage the imported technology that was fundamental for modernization. Since the Ministry of Education had decreed in 1962 that anthropology should be taught at universities rather than by the Institute of Anthropology, the institute’s last batch of anthropologists graduated in 1963. The University of the Andes started a Department of Anthropology under the direction of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, seconded by his wife, Alicia. The National University also began to train anthropologists in the 1960s, albeit sporadically at first. During the following decade the University of Antioquia in Medellín and the Universidad del Cauca in Popayán followed suit. Nevertheless, between 1963 and 1978, about 70 percent of those receiving B.A.s in anthropology graduated from the University of the Andes. The Reichel-Dolmatoffs’ time at the University of the Andes ended when, against all expectations, the shock waves of the 1968 student upheaval in Europe hit that stronghold of the middle and upper classes. Although relatively short, their tenure there was a remarkable boost to archaeology, since they managed to inspire a “1940s-style” need for urgent fieldwork. They attracted a number of foreign scholars who came to teach and carry out research, among them Sylvia Broadbent, who, through systematic excavations in Muisca territory, set up a first chronological framework for the Muisca and preceding occupations in the region.

By the 1970s Gonzalo Correal, working for the ICAN, began his research on the largely unknown Paleo-Indian period; his program was known as “Man and Environment in the Pleistocene,” and it lasted nearly three decades. Most of the fieldwork was on the Sabana, the upland plateau around Bogotá, and it was often conducted in partnership with the Dutch palynologist Thomas van der Hammen, whose ongoing research projects, starting in the 1960s, laid the foundation for the environmental archaeology of the 1980s and 1990s. At about the same time, Carlos Angulo Valdés, working from his headquarters at the Universidad del Norte in Barranquilla, pursued his own long-term program of research in the Atlantic lowlands; he was one of the group of archaeologists who used the methods of ceramic seriation developed by Evans and Meggers. He focused primarily on the formative period, with his work on the site of Malambo as a starting point In southwestern Colombia Julio César Cubillos, at the University of the Valle in Cali, carried out extensive fieldwork in the valley of the Cauca River. The