Inhabited Land

What traces do we leave behind after living in a place? The first area you'll come to in the gallery contains objects that belonged to Colombia's original inhabitants and gives us an idea of the way these groups identified and harnessed natural resources. Stone tools and debris point to the daily activities of those who inhabited the territory about 14,000 years ago. The carved stones used for cutting skins, meat and fibers, as well as those joined to wooden fragments to build spears and arrows, make it possible to imagine practices linked to gathering, hunting, fishing and food processing.

The display cases contain objects used by temporary inhabitants of the coastlands, marshes, mangroves, rivers, plains and mountains of Colombia's Caribbean region. The groups’ migrations were marked by changes in tide levels and by periods of drought and abundance that affected the resources needed for survival. Accumulations of shells, snails and bones, known as concheros, are the result of debris left behind by those who inhabited the region about 5,000 years ago. Similarly, in the municipality of San Jacinto, Bolívar, stone tools, remains of posts from dwellings, and ovens for baking pottery and food have been found and can be interpreted as the beginnings of sedentism.

It is worth pausing to observe the so-called Puerto Chacho vessel, whose fragments are the oldest evidence of a ceramic container in Colombia, and date back to approximately 5,000 years ago.

Next, you'll see gold pieces and the stone matrices used to shape some of these elements, which held great symbolic value for ancient communities. These pieces were used as sacred offerings, ornaments, and musical instruments by the inhabitants of the Pacific region, the Andes, and the Caribbean coast, who were familiar with the techniques used to manipulate and process this material.

Finally, the artwork, "Stratification of a Utopian Garbage Dump", created in 1987 by Alicia Barney, evokes the processes of observation and collection of archaeological and geological samples. The assembled elements suggest a series of layers that lead us to reflect on the traces left by natural and human processes in any given terrain.