Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (March 6, 1912—May 16, 1994) was an anthropologist, known for
his holistic approach and his in-depth fieldworks among tropical rainforest cultures (e.g.
Tucano).
Contents
* 1 Life
* 2 Approach
* 3 Bibliography
* 4 External links
Life
He was born in Salzburg, Austria. Oriented in the classics (Latin and Greek) he received his high
school diploma from the Benedictine school of Kremsmunster in Austria. He graduated from the
Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Munich, Germany with a fine arts degree in 1935. He
attended classes at the Falculte des Lettres of the Sorbonne and at the University of Paris from
1937 to 1939, yet was ultimately persuaded to leave Europe on the eve of the Second World
War. Gerardo emigrated to Colombia, where the rest of his life would be spent in research and
participant observation in the name of Anthropology. Throughout the years of the Second
World War, he worked as a paleontologist for petroleum companies in Bogotá. ReichelDolmatoff gradually built an enthused interest for conducting fieldwork which would take him
and his studies all throughout the country; from the jungles of the Amazon to the tropical rain
forests of the Choco. Gerardo’s initial research was essential in creating the basic chronological
framework for most of the Colombian area, and is still used today. In a trip to the upper Meta
River in the Orinoco plains in 1940, he conducted research and later published the earliest
studies ever done on the Guahibo Indians. Just one year after becoming a Colombian citizen in
1942, Gerardo married fellow colleague Alicia Dussan, who herself was one of the first graduate
students of the Instituto Etnologico Nacional. The two were to form a life-long bond and closelyknit research team concentrating on Colombian archaeology. Of their four children, all have held
prominent careers with two of them (Ines and Elizabeth Reichel-Dolmatoff) following in their
parents footpath of anthropology and archaeology. The wide assortment and diversity of the
Reichel-Dolmatoff’s research and interests is apparent in the publications of the Instituto
Etnologico Nacional. 1943 marked the date of Gerardo’s first publication on the Muisca
settlement of Soacha. That same year, he and Alicia conducted an analysis on the burial urns of
the Magdalena River. They also published a never-before-seen study on the blood type
variations between the indigenous groups of the Pijao in the Department of Tolima. Switching
residency to the city of Santa Marta in 1946, the Reichel-Dolmatoff’s headed the Instituto
Etnologico del Magdalena. For the next five years, the two conducted extensive research
throughout the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region, focusing particularly on the Tairona’s
descendants, the Koguis, also known as the Kaggaba, though some attention was also paid to
the Kuna Indians at the Caiman Nuevo River, west of the Gulf of Uraba. Several years later,
Gerardo published his classic ethnohistorical study on the Kogi, demonstrating their connections
to ancestral Tairona chiefdoms. In the late 1950s, Gerardo and his family moved the coastal city
of Cartagena. He taught classes in medical anthropology at the university there. In 1954, the
Reichel-Dolmatoff’s located and excavated the site of Barlovento, which was the first early
Formative shell-midden site found in Colombia. Their work at Momil was also pioneering in that
they conducted a study of subsistence change never before revealed in Colombian archaeology.
After returning to Bogotá in 1960, Gerardo began fieldwork at the site of Puerta Hormiga, which
revealed what was at that time, the earliest dated pottery ever discovered in the New World. In
1963, he and Alicia created the first Department of Anthropology in Colombia at the Universidad
de Los Andes. Gerardo received a visiting fellowship to Cambridge University in 1970 and also
later became an adjunct professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of
California-Los Angeles. Yet despite all his responsibilities as a teacher and the enormous
pressures as a professional to publish, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff never slowed down. He
undertook trips to study ancient San Agustin cultures, excavated the important site of Monsu,
and even conducted extensive research throughout the Darien region. Throughout his life,
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff established himself as a prominent, self-achieved professional in the
field of Anthropology. He was a Foreign Associate Member of the National Academy of Sciences
in the United States. He was also a member of the Academia Real Espanola de Ciencias, and was
even rewarded the Thomas H. Huxley medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great
Britain and Ireland in 1975. In 1983, he became one of the founding members of the Third
World Academy of Sciences.
Approach
Reichel-Dolmatoff had always stressed the importance of holistic research. By adopting a policy
of consistent participant observation with the peoples he studied, he was able to better grasp
and later clarify the world views of numerous populations and cultures now being diminished
today. He very well may have been the very first anthropologist to ever ingest the entheogenic
drug, ayahuasca. In so doing, he partook in a sacred ritual central to the organizing principles
and cosmological beliefs of many Amazonian peoples. He understood the many lessons to be
learned and emulated from indigenous societies throughout the world. Gerardo ReichelDolmatoff’s hard work and extensive studies throughout Colombia and South America as a
whole, have paved the way for many more generations of aspiring archaeologists, including the
likes of Alan Ereira, Graham Townsley, and Felicity Nook whose own research is an extension of
Gerardo’s. His many publications and achievements have deemed him the “Father of Colombian
Archaeology”—and rightly so.
Bibliography
* People of Aritama (ISBN 0-415-33045-9)
* Land of the Elder Brothers (ISBN 958-638-323-7)
* Recent Advances in the Archaeology of the Northern Andes (ISBN 0-917956-90-7)
* Rainforest Shamans: Essays on the Tukano Indians of the Northwest Amazon (ISBN 09527302-4-3)
* Yurupari: Studies of an Amazonian Foundation Myth (ISBN 0-945454-08-2)
* The Forest Within: The World-view of the Tukano Amazonian Indians (ISBN 0-9527302-0-0)
* Indians of Colombia: Experience and Cognition (ISBN 958-9138-68-3)
* The Shaman and the Jaguar: A Study of Narcotic Drugs Among the Indians of Colombia (ISBN
0-87722-038-7)
* Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Indians (ISBN 0-22670732-6)
* Colombia (Ancient Peoples and Places)
External links
* Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff: A View from the Headwaters. The Ecologist, Vol. 29 No. 4, July
1999.
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