Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (March 6, 1912 – May 16, 1994) was an anthropologist, known for his holistic approach and his in-depth fieldwork among tropical rainforest cultures (e.g. Tucano).

Early life

He was born in Salzburg, Austria. Oriented in the classics (Latin and Greek) he did some studies at the Benedictine school of Kremsmunster in Austria. He took classes from the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Munich, Germany until 1935. He attended classes at the Falculté 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 field of Anthropology.

Career

During the Second World War he worked as a paleontologist for petroleum companies in Bogotá. Reichel-Dolmatoff gradually developed an enthusiastic interest for conducting fieldwork which would take him and his studies 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.

In 1943 Gerardo wrote his first article 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 study on the blood type variations among the indigenous groups of the Pijao in the Department of Tolima.

Switching residency to the city of Santa Marta in 1946, the Reichel-Dolmatoffs headed the Instituto Etnologico del Magdalena. For the next five years, Gerardo and his wife conducted research throughout the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region, focusing particularly on the Tairona’s descendants, the Koguis, also known as the Kogi or 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 an 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-Dolmatoffs located and excavated the site of Barlovento, which was the first early Formative shell-midden site found in Colombia. At Momil they conducted the first study of subsistence change in Colombian archaeology. After returning to Bogotá in 1960, Gerardo began fieldwork at the site of Puerto Hormiga where the earliest dated pottery in the New World (at that time) was discovered.^{[citation needed]}

In 1963, he and his wife created the first Department of Anthropology in Colombia at the Universidad de Los Andes.^{[citation needed]} 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.

Reichel-Dolmatoff was a Foreign Associate Member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. He was also a member of the Academia Real Española de Ciencias, and was given 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.^{[citation needed]}

Personal life

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 lifelong bond and close-knit research team concentrating on Colombian archaeology. Of their four children, all have held prominent careers^{[citation needed]} with two of them (Ines and Elizabeth Reichel-Dolmatoff) following in their parents footpath of anthropology and archaeology.

He is buried at Santa Elena in Medellín, Colombia.

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  Burial place

Approach

Reichel-Dolmatoff had always stressed the importance of holistic research. By adopting the approach 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 Reichel-Dolmatoff’s hard work and extensive studies throughout Colombia as a whole, have paved the way for many more generations of aspiring archaeologists and anthropologist. His many research and publications achievements (Oyuela-Caycedo 1998) have earned him the title of “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 0-9527302-4-3)
• 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 0-226-70732-6)
• Colombia (Ancient Peoples and Places)
• "Oyuela-Caycedo, Augusto 1996 Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff: 1914-1994. American Antiquity 61(1):52-56."
• "Oyuela-Caycedo, Augusto 1998 Bibliography of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff: 1943-1997. In Recent Advances in the Archaeology of the Northern Andes, edited by Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo and J. Scott Raymond, Monograph 39, pp. ix-xv. The Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los Angeles" (ISBN-10: 0917956907)

External links

• Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo (July 1999). "A View from the Headwaters". The Ecologist 29 (4). http://www.theecologist.info/page9.html. 

See also: Reichel and Dolmatov