Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (6 March 1912 – 17 May 1994) was an Austrian anthropologist and archaeologist. He is known for his fieldwork among many different Amerindian cultures such as in the Amazonian tropical rainforests (e.g. Desana Tucano), and also among dozens of other indigenous groups in Colombia in the Caribbean Coast (such as the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta), as well as others living in the Pacific Coast, Llanos Orientales, and in the Andean and inter-Andean regions (Muisca) as well as in other areas of Colombia, and he also did research on campesino societies. For nearly six decades he advanced ethnographic and anthropological studies, as well as archeological research, and as a scholar was a prolific writer and public figure renowned as a staunch defender of indigenous peoples. Reichel-Dolmatoff has worked with other archaeologists and anthropologists such as Marianne Cardale de Schrimpff, Ana María Groot, Gonzalo Correal Urrego and others. He died 17 May 1994 in Colombia.
Personal life
Reichel was born in 1912 in Salzburg, then part of Austria-Hungary, as son of the artist Carl Anton Reichel and Hilde Constance Dolmatoff. Oriented in the classics (Latin and Greek) he did most of his high school at the Benedictine school of Kremsmunster in Austria. He attended classes at the Faculté des Lettres of the Sorbonne and in the École du Louvre from late 1937 to 1938. Reichel emigrated to Colombia in 1939, where he became a Colombian citizen in 1942. Reichel became member and was the Secretary to the Free France Movement (1942-1943) with the help of his colleague and friend the French ethnologist Paul Rivet who was the Delegate of the Resistance of France Libre and living in Colombia. General Charles De Gaulle later awarded Reichel-Dolmatoff with the medal of the Ordre national du Mérite. Reichel-Dolmatoff spent the rest of his life in research in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, ethnoecology, ethnohistory, ethnoastronomy, material culture, art, and vernacular architecture, among others.
Career
Reichel-Dolmatoff developed a keen interest for conducting fieldwork which would take him and his studies throughout the country, the Caribbean area, La Guajira desert, the Chocó rainforests, the Llanos Orientales, to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Amazon rainforests.
Some of Reichel-Dolmatoff's archeological 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 done on the Guahibo Indians. In 1943 Gerardo wrote his first article on the Muisca settlement of Soacha. That same year, together with his wife anthropologist and archeologist Alicia Dussán, he conducted an analysis on pre-Columbian burial urns of the Magdalena River. Working in the Tolima region inhabited by Amerindians and the renowned indigenous leader Quintin Lame, they also published a study indicating the indigenous culture of the local populations and also indicated the blood type variations among the indigenous groups of the Pijao in the Department of Tolima as further proof of their Amerindian identity as these tribes were arguing over rights to their ancestral territories.
Switching residency to the city of Santa Marta in 1946, the Reichel-Dolmatoffs created and headed the Instituto Etnologico del Magdalena in 1945 and created also a small museum about the anthropology and archeology of the Sierra Nevada region. Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote a two volume monography of the Kogi Indians in the 1940s which to this day is considered a classic reference. For the next five years, Gerardo and his colleague and wife conducted research throughout the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region, focusing particularly on the Tairona descendants, the Kogui, also known as the Kogi or Kaggaba, and also worked with the Arhuaco and Wiwa indigenous groups, as well as ethnography of a peasant community among the people of Aritama (Kankuamo). Reichel-Dolmatoff carried out a regional study of the area covering archeology, ethnohistory and anthropology, making it one of the first such regional studies made in Colombia. Reichel also did research in the Pacific coast and studied amongst others the Kuna of the Caiman Nuevo River, west of the Gulf of Urabá. Several years later, Reichel published ethnohistorical studies and anthropological research related to the Kogi, demonstrating their connections to ancestral Tairona chiefdoms.