62 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 146 
Although the influence of the Tairona Culture can be detected over 
a large portion of the lowlands just prior to the Conquest, its maxi- 
mum development was achieved on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada 
de Santa Marta. In a geographical context of difficult topography, this 
culture is striking for its feats of architecture and engineering: Ter- 
races for house sites and fields, stone floors, containing walls, stone 
stairways on the terraces and house entrances, roads paved with stone 
slabs to facilitate communication within and outside the settlement, 
stone bridges, irrigation canals, drains, stone porticos, columns and 
stelas, and tombs covered with large slabs. 
Also characteristic is the ceramic style, which includes composite 
silhouette forms, tetrapods, double jars, jars with tubular spout, an- 
thropomorphic and zoomorphic jars, annular bases, and decoration by 
excision and modeling in anthropomorphic and zoomorphic forms, 
especially the feline. Black pottery is typical, and painting is absent. 
Metallurgy is well developed. In the socio-political sphere, large urban 
centers, a marked division of labor, social stratification, incipient 
militarism, theocratic government, and intertribal trade can be noted. 
In the Andean region, the Chibcha Culture and the complexes of 
Rio Pichinde, Rio Bolo, and Quebrada Seca (Ford, 1944) represent 
Period V. The favorable geographical conditions — temperate, flat, 
and fertile land, abundant water, and a topography that favored in- 
tercommunication — explain in large part the unity of cultural pattern 
over the extensive zone comprised by the altiplano of Cundi and 
Boyaca, a zone that at the time of the Spanish Conquest appears to 
have been densely populated. 
One of the most frequently proposed hypotheses about the origin 
of the Chibcha derives them from the Amazonian region ( Schottelius, 
1946, pp. 221-225). However, the same scarcity of stratigraphic ex- 
cavations and absence of typological seriation of the known sites 
exists here as in the southwestern part of Andean Colombia. We con- 
sequently have no reliable information on the sequence of develop- 
ment. Inferences about spatial extent, drawn from the distribution of 
isolated elements, are equally speculative, particularly in regard to 
comparisons with the Tairona and groups in southwestern Colombia. 
Most of the excavated sites are buildings and cemeteries with little 
depth of deposit, but refuse deposits so far investigated also exhibit 
little depth of accumulation, suggesting either that the history of the 
Chibcha Culture was relatively short, beginning some 300 years prior 
to the Spanish Conquest, or that the pattern of settlement was dis- 
persed rather than concentrated (cf. Haury and Cubillos, 1953). 
Whatever the explanation, the high social and political development 
