Diverse trends mark the archaeology of the 1980s. On the one hand the FIAN sponsored one-person, short-term projects in traditional site-oriented archaeology all over the country, and for publication it favored thorough site reports rather than fanciful flights into newfangled theories; it also welcomed research in subjects such as ethnology, geology, history, and biology where this provided answers to archaeological questions. Noteworthy are the various studies by Anne Legast on the identification of animals represented in archaeological objects. On the other hand long-term regional projects became quite frequent. Among the first was the Swiss-sponsored Calima project carried out in collaboration with the ICAN; a number of scholars participated in this project—notably, Warwick Bray, Leonor Herrera, and Marianne Schrimpff. The project had a strong interdisciplinary component and focused on landscape and changes in agricultural adaptations. It reinforced a trend that Correal and van der Hammen had initiated and Angela Andrade had followed: the study of terra preta (anthropic) soils in the Amazon region, carried out jointly with the soil scientist Pedro Botero (who would become the much sought after soil consultant on many excavations). Luisa Fernanda de Turbay, a palynologist, is also a popular consultant, as well as the director of another interdisciplinary group that carried out a long-term project on anthropic soils and cultivars in the Amazon basin. She is the founder of Erigaie, a private consultancy enterprise that offers pollen analysis as well as the identification of animal bone and plant material.

Jean François Bouchard of the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris introduced French-style excavations with his long-term work in the Tumaco region, carried out with anthropology students. Two further projects, both influential in the sense of training students and orienting the next generation in methodology and theory, concentrated on the San Agustín area. The more modest version, directed by Héctor Llanos of the Department of Anthropology of the National University, was supported by successive grants from the FIAN. It aimed to establish the geographic limits of the San Agustín culture and to study the dynamic relationship between human settlement patterns and the environment. The second project, directed by Robert Drennan of the University of Pittsburgh in collaboration with the University of the Andes, carried out an ambitious regional survey in the La Plata area, a region adjoining San Agustín and sharing many of its cultural traits but little studied at that time. Drennan’s main interests have been demographic trends, the distribution of population, and the rise of sociopolitical complexity. Shovel tests were carried out in the field by small battalions of students, the most promising of whom were given financial support to obtain postgraduate degrees at the University of Pittsburgh. Out of this group came several of the brilliant young people who made their names in the 1990s, such as Augusto Oyuela, known for both his research on the Tairona occupation in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the surrounding lowlands and his work on the preceramic period in the Atlantic lowlands, and Carl Langebaek, well known for his research in the Muisca region and, recently, in Tierradentro. Others obtained postgraduate degrees through different channels: Felipe Cárdenas and José Vicente Rodriguez in physical anthropology, a subject that had been almost abandoned since the 1940s, are both influential for their teaching and training at University of the Andes and National University, respectively.

In southwestern Colombia Cristóbal Gnecco has concentrated on preceramic lithic assemblages, Diógenes Patiño has studied the southern Pacific lowlands, and Carlos Armando Rodríguez has worked on the Cauca Valley. Roberto Lleras, working from the Gold Museum, has achieved new insights into Muisca metalwork, and Eduardo Londoño, who concentrates on ethnohistorical research, is editor of the Bulletin of the Gold Museum (started in 1978), which celebrated the arrival of the new millennium by going wholly virtual—the first casualty of the Internet craze. This generation also includes those who chose to stay and make the most of opportunities in Colombia, such as Héctor Salgado, for many years director of the archaeological division of INCIVA in the Department