page_title: Tairona
section_title: Arts and crafts
hierarchical_section_title: Tairona / Arts and crafts
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of Tairona gold pendants in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York, USA taken by Rolf Müller on February 11 2006 using a Canon Inc. EOS 350D digital camera with an EFS 18-55mm lens. Copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Taironapendants_metropolitan_2006.jpg
context_page_description: Tairona was a Pre-Columbian culture of Colombia, which consisted in a group of chiefdoms in the region of Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in present-day Cesar, Magdalena and La Guajira Departments of Colombia, South America, which goes back at least to the 1st century AD and had significant demographic growth around the 11th century.
  The Tairona people formed one of the two principal linguistic groups of the Chibchan family, the other being the Muisca. Genetic and archaeological evidence shows a relatively dense occupation of the region by at least 200 BC. Pollen data compiled by Luisa Fernanda Herrera in 1980 shows considerable deforestation and the use of cultigens such as yuca and maize since possibly 1200 BC. However, occupation of the Colombian Caribbean coast by sedentary or semi-sedentary populations has been documented to have occurred by c. 4000 BC.
  Ethnohistorical data shows that initial contact with the Spanish was tolerated by the Tairona; but by 1600 AD confrontations grew, and a small part of the Tairona population moved to the higher stretches of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.
context_section_description: The Tairona ceramic chronologies range from 200 BCE to 1650 CE, and the Caribbean coast of Colombia has evidence of ceramics from at least 2500 BCE.  Recent investigations in Chengue, Parque Tairona by the Colombian archaeologist Alejandro Dever show significant variations in the ceramic that allow for a chronological division of sequence into at least five phases.  The first phase, called Nahuange 1, appears to start at around 200 BCE and ends at around 500 CE when there appears to be a peak in the population.  A second phase spans from 500 AD to about 900 AD; it can be called Nehuange 2, and was called Buritaca after detailed excavations by Jack Wynn in the 1970s.  From c. 900 CE began what is commonly called the Tairona period, characterized by an impressive increase in the variation, size and number of ceramic forms, many conserving the styles from the Nehuange or Buritaca phases.  The Tairona 1 through 3 phases, from 900 to 1650, show significant local variations.  This was shown by numerous works done in the 1980s by Colombian archaeologists Augusto Oyuela, Carl Langebaek, Luisa Fernanda Herrera and Ana Maria Groot, and others.  During the Tairona period, the evidence for exchange increases as does the population of the entire region.  The causes for this population increase are not fully known but what is evident is the robust local exchange networks that emerge at this time.
  The Tairona civilization is most renowned for its distinctive goldwork. The earliest known Tairona gold work has been described for the Neguanje Period (from about 300 to 800 AD). Its use in the Tairona society appears to have extended beyond the elite, although little proof of this exists. The gold artifacts consist of pendants, lip-plugs, nose ornaments, necklaces, and earrings. The Tairona cast a meltable mixture of gold, silver and copper called Tumbaga into intricate moulds using clay, sand, charcoal and lost wax. Depletion gilding, using controlled corrosion to remove copper from the surface, gave the appearance of solid gold. Cast Tairona figure pendants (known as "caciques") in particular stand out among the goldworks of pre-Columbian America because of their richness in detail. The figurines depict human subjects - probably the shamanic elite that ruled them - in ornate dresses and with a large animal mask over the face. Many elements of their body posture (e.g., hands on their hips) and dress signal an aggressive stance, and hence are interpreted by some as evidence for the power of the wearer and the bellicose nature of Tairona society at that time. Not only that, but recent revelations have shown that this was the first step of a process known as 'transformation', which involved members of the shaman elite putting on sub-labial ornaments, nose rings etc. to resemble certain bat species and extract powers from the animal, opening their eyes to a greater truth.
caption: Tairona figure pendants in gold
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