Goldsmiths of the middle Cauca valley in Colombia's coffee-growing highlands, renowned for tumbaga (gold-copper alloy) lost-wax castings — poporos, seated human figures, zoomorphic ornaments — buried as passports to the afterlife.
The Early/Classic Quimbaya tradition (c. 500 BCE-600 CE) gave way to a distinct Late Quimbaya florescence (c. 800-1600 CE) with more geometric, jaguar/frog/lizard-man imagery; the Late Quimbaya population was largely annihilated in the Spanish conquest by the mid-16th century, and the Quimbaya language is only fragmentarily attested today.
The atlas holds 2 border frames for Quimbaya — the shape you scrub through changes in 500 BC · 800.
British Museum exhibition book surveying power and goldworking in the ancient chiefdoms of Colombia, including the Quimbaya of the Cauca valley.
Broad continental survey covering the Quimbaya goldworking tradition within Colombian pre-Columbian archaeology (broad context).