Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff

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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).

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[edit] 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. Reichel-Dolmatoff 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 closely-knit 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 Española 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.

[edit] 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 Reichel-Dolmatoff’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.

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