Additionally, examined are city monoliths and natural water sources aligned with the Winter Solstice and Infiernito suggesting the presence of a processional pilgrimage route. First, explored are settlement patterns for water control systems, intensive agriculture, and early residential settlement. ![]() Though population size is not known, proposed residents at Villa are based upon available archaeological and historical information pertaining to Prehispanic hydraulic systems and cosmic ontogeny under environmental conditions of rapid climate change. ![]() This paper investigates chiefdom ecodynamics (socio-ecological dynamics of coupled human and natural systems) or the interplay of culture, natural environment, and population. Hydraulic systems and religious sanctuary were closely related and fundamental to the development of centralized chiefdoms incorporating the Indigenous residents of Villa. Chiefs mitigated limited water supplies by engineering a hydraulic landscape sanctioned by religious cosmology embodied in the monolithic monuments of the astronomical-meteorological observatory at the Parque Arqueológico de Monquirá (Infiernito), the Stonehenge of Colombia. In an environment where effective rainfall is often insufficient or inconveniently timed for dry farming irrigation was vital to human settlement in the semi-arid portions of this highland valley. Intensive agriculture practiced along key water ways was necessary to combat conditions of major erosion, prolonged regional drought, and extreme flooding. In the Leiva Valley, the settlement landscape and irrigation agriculture were key features of chiefdoms or ranked societies-kinship-based social groups with unequal access to status positions and prestige. ![]() While ideological intangibles may partly account for the earliest decentralized Muisca communities, it is necessary to understand the full-range of variability in intermediate-level chiefdoms particularly in terms of the links between the natural environment and socio-cultural processes. Instead, studies in the Valley of Leiva favor decentralized authority characteristic of social hierarchies in local domestic groups with kinship, religion, and prestige gained through sponsored feasts intensive agriculture on superior quality soils is not stressed. Some researchers discount economic and demographic factors in the rise of politically centralized chiefdoms particularly outside the Sabana de Bogotá. These data imply that the chiefdom of Zaquenzipá at El Infiernito incorporated the native people of Villa into its settlement orbit who resided and practiced intensive agriculture near an important religious sanctuary.Īrchaeological studies of the Muisca in highland Colombia emphasize social history and ideological causation. Archaeological remains obscured by colonial and modern settlement suggests a Native American population near a ceremonial-cosmological setting spatially aligned with the monolithic observatory at El Infiernito. Recent research in Villa, importantly, begins to reveal evidence for hydraulic features, sanctuary architecture, and Prehispanic ritual artifacts. Assumed to be unpopulated before Villa’s founding, historical narratives are mostly silent about the presence of Muisca residents except for one inescapable fact, Native Indigenous people built and maintained the Early Colonial city. ![]() Founded in 1572, this Colonial town today is a popular tourist destination in the Valley of Leiva of the Eastern Andean highlands that played a significant role in the early history of both Colonial and Republican Colombia. Little is known about the inhabitants of Villa de Leyva (Villa) before Spanish Contact.
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