page_title: History of Cartagena, Colombia
section_title: Pre-Columbian era: 7000 BC – 1500 AD
hierarchical_section_title: History of Cartagena, Colombia / Pre-Columbian era: 7000 BC – 1500 AD
context_section_description: The Caribbean region, particularly in the area from the Sinú River delta to the Cartagena de Indias bay, appears to be the first documented human community in today's Colombia: the Puerto Hormiga Culture.
  Until the Spanish colonization many cultures derived from the Karib, Malibu and Arawak language families lived along the Caribbean Colombian coast. In the late pre-Columbian era, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, was home to  the Tayrona people, closely related with the Chibcha family language.
  Archaeologists estimate that around 7000 BC, the settlement of the formative Puerto Hormiga Culture, located near the limits between the departments of Bolívar and Sucre was established. In this area archaeologists have found the most ancient ceramic objects in the Americas, dating from around 4000 BC. The primary reason for the proliferation of primitive societies in this area is the relative mildness of climate and the abundance of wildlife which through continuous hunting allowed the inhabitants a comfortable life.
  In today's villages of Maria La Baja, Sincerín, El Viso and Mahates and Rotinet, there have also been discoveries of the remains of culturally organized societies through the excavation of maloka-type buildings, which are directly related to the early Puerto Hormiga settlements.
  Archaeological investigations date the decline of the Puerto Hormiga culture and its related settlements to around 3000 BC. The rise of a much more developed culture, the Monsú, who lived at the end of the Dique Canal, near today's Cartagena neighborhoods  Pasacaballos and Ciénaga Honda at the northernmost part of Barú Island. The Monsú culture inherited the Puerto Hormiga culture's use of the art of pottery but also developed a mixed economy of agriculture and basic manufacture. the Monsú people's diet was based mostly on seashells, sweet- and salt-water fish.
  The ethnologists who discovered Monsú, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff and his wife Alicia Dussan, found an interesting artificial mound created by them consisting in vases and rests of skeletons. After the first excavations, the Monsú mound was found to be a communal hut that had strong wood logs around it and was built on different levels, each one from a different period of time. The most ancient of these is the Turbana Period, from 3350 BC.  This archaeological zone, less than 6 miles from Cartagena de Indias' downtown boasts the most complete collection of ceramic instruments in Colombia and the American continent. The ceramic patterns found in Monsú, are a tour de force for students of archeology of the Caribbean sea basin and northern South America.
  The Reichel-Dolmatoffs later found other artificial mounds, dating from 3200 to 1000 BC, thus making the suburbs of modern  Cartagena the seat of the first organized society in Colombia, and one of the most ancient in the Americas.
  The development of the Sinú society in today's department of Cordoba and Sucre, eclipsed these first developments around the Cartagena Bay area.  Around 1500 the area was inhabited by different tribes of the Karib language family, more precisely the Mocanae sub-family. These were:
  In the downtown island: Kalamarí Tribe
  In the Tierrabomba island: Carex Tribe
  In the Barú island, then peninsula: Bahaire Tribe
  In the eastern coast of the exterior bay: Cospique Tribe
  In the suburban area of Turbaco: Yurbaco Tribe
  Some subsidiary tribes of the Kalamari lived in today's neighborhood of Pie de la Popa, and other subsidiaries from the Cospique lived in the Membrillal and Pasacaballos areas. Among these, according to the first chronicles the Kalamari Tribe had preeminence.
  
  These tribes, though physically and administratively separated, shared common architecture, such as hut structures consisting of circular rooms with tall roofs inside wooden palisades.
caption: Alonso de Ojeda passed through the bay in 1505 but decided to continue to Uraba.
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