Reading the Past on the Mountainsides of Colombia: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Patriotic Geology, Archaeology, and Historiography

Abstract

Abstract The mid-nineteenth-century Colombian Chorographic Commission drew on geology, archaeology, and history to project a patriotic past onto the Andean landscape of the young republic then known as New Granada. This geographic expedition, led initially by Agustín Codazzi and Manuel Ancízar, explored and mapped the country from 1850 to 1859. For the commissioners and their associates among the creole elite, the history of past epochs was “written” on the mountainsides for scientific travelers such as themselves to “read.” They portrayed disparate historical and prehistoric events as overlapping and interrelated. The commission’s texts and images linked a catastrophic interpretation of geologic origins to historia patria (patriotic history). The commissioners merged the wars of conquest and independence into a two-act drama enacted on a singular territorial stage. Their reading of geologic, archaeological, and historical evidence endowed the impoverished young Republic of New Granada with a grandiose territory, a great precursor civilization, and a legacy of patriotic resistance to imperialism. Their interpretations, however, would prove controversial. During the second half of the nineteenth century, debates over geology, archaeology, and history reflected conflicting Liberal and Conservative political projects. Moreover, the midcentury intellectuals failed to incorporate contemporaneous indigenous and poor citizens into an imagined national community based on the ideal of a shared historical memory embedded on a readable landscape.