{"it":{"id":"SAM-012","kind":"site","sub":"South America","name":"San Agustín Archaeological Park","place":"Colombia","lat":1.917,"lon":-76.233,"date":"The dates of the statues are uncertain, but they are believed to have been carved…","nfacts":5,"tags":["Andes"],"sum":"In southern Colombia, at San Agustín, more than 600 stone statues stand over tombs. Some have fangs, some hold smaller figures, and the tallest reaches about 7 m.","why":"A field of tomb statues made by a society whose own name is lost.","src":[384],"nsrc":2,"yt":"How do you honour people whose name is lost?","rel":["SAM-009"],"hook":"San Agustín's tombs hold stone statues of gods and spirits. About 600 are known across the region."},"S":{"384":["Wikipedia: San Agustín Archaeological Park","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Agust%C3%ADn_Archaeological_Park"]},"rec":{"id":"SAM-012","alias":[],"ms":[{"f":"San Agustín is","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"520","u":"km","o":"San Agustín is 520 km from Bogotá.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Agustín_Archaeological_Park&oldid=1365739903","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1365739903 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2374"},{"f":"The Heights of the Idols is","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"4","u":"km","o":"The Heights of the Idols is 4 km from the town of Isnos and contains the tallest statue of all the parks, at 7 meters.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Agustín_Archaeological_Park&oldid=1365739903","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1365739903 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2375"},{"f":"the tallest statue of all the parks at","a":"dimension (unspecified)","v":"7","u":"meters","o":"The Heights of the Idols is 4 km from the town of Isnos and contains the tallest statue of all the parks, at 7 meters.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Agustín_Archaeological_Park&oldid=1365739903","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1365739903 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2376"},{"f":"The Heights of the Stones park is","a":"distance (not a site dimension)","v":"7","u":"km","o":"The Heights of the Stones park is 7 km from Isnos includes the famous \"Double I\" (\"Doble Yo\") statue.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Agustín_Archaeological_Park&oldid=1365739903","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1365739903 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2377"},{"f":"The statues vary in height the tallest being","a":"height","v":"23","u":"ft","o":"The statues vary in height, the tallest being 23 ft tall.","unc":"","by":"per cited source (see citation)","yr":"","m":"documentary: verbatim sentence auto-extracted from Wikipedia revision","c":"no inline ref in article","pg":"","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Agustín_Archaeological_Park&oldid=1365739903","b":"S","bb":"auto-extracted, Wikipedia rev 1365739903 (tertiary); unit/attribute classified by keyword - check context in value_original","t":"MEASUREMENT","n":"","id":"M2378"}],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"The dates of the statues are uncertain, but they are believed to have been carved between 5–400 AD.","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/744","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"1.91666667","lon":"-76.23333333","src":"Wikidata P625 + UNESCO WHC list XML (agree ≤0.05°)","agree":"no OSM match","b":"V","note":"no second source found","osm":""},"src":[{"id":"S0380","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=San_Agustín_Archaeological_Park&oldid=1365739903"},{"id":"S0600","t":"Wikipedia: San Agustín Archaeological Park","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Agust%C3%ADn_Archaeological_Park"},{"id":"VSAM-012-3","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: San Agustín Archaeological Park","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/744/"},{"id":"VSAM-012-4","t":"ICANH (Colombia): Parque Arqueológico San Agustín","u":"https://www.icanh.gov.co/parques-icanh/parque-arqueologico-san-agustin"},{"id":null,"t":"González Fernández, V. (2007), Prehispanic Change in the Mesitas Community, University of Pittsburgh Memoirs in Latin American Archaeology 18 (free PDF).","u":"https://sites.pitt.edu/~ccapubs/pdfdownloads/PITTmem18-Gonzalez_2007.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"Drennan, R. D., González Fernández, V. and Sánchez, C. A. (2018), San Agustín-Isnos Settlement Dataset, Comparative Archaeology Database, University of Pittsburgh.","u":"https://www.cadb.pitt.edu/paramsurv/index.html"}],"sum":"In the hills of southern Colombia, a stream runs across a bed of solid rock, and the rock under the water has been carved. People long ago turned the stream bed itself into a religious monument, so that worship and running water occupied the same stone. This is the Fuente de Lavapatas, and it is only one piece of one of the strangest gatherings of sculpture in the Americas.\n\nSan Agustín Archaeological Park lies in the Colombian Massif, the knot of the southern Andes from which the country's three mountain ranges spread north, in the upper basin of the Magdalena River in the department of Huila, some 520 km from Bogotá. UNESCO, which inscribed it in 1995, describes three separate properties totalling 116 hectares: the San Agustín group, with the Mesitas, La Estación, Alto de Lavapatas and the Fuente, and two sites in the neighbouring municipality of Isnos, the Alto de los Ídolos and the Alto de las Piedras. Remains of the same culture are scattered over more than 300 square kilometres around them. UNESCO calls this the largest complex of pre-Columbian megalithic funerary monuments and statuary in the region; Wikipedia goes further and calls it the world's largest necropolis.\n\nWhat draws people here are the statues. About 600 San Agustín statues are known, a third of them inside the park. They stand over tombs, guarding stone corridors, columns and monolithic sarcophagi beneath earthen mounds, some 30 m across. They are carved from blocks of tuff and other volcanic rock, often with short legs, combining human features with those of animals such as jaguars, bats and crocodiles. Some bare fangs; some hold smaller figures. UNESCO describes guardians more than 4 m high and weighing several tonnes, and the tallest, at the Alto de los Ídolos, reaches about 7 m. They were once painted in bright yellow, red, black and white, and on a few the colour survives. In the Bosque de las Estatuas, the Forest of Statues, examples gathered from across the region stand together.\n\nWho made them? UNESCO credits chiefdom societies, communities ruled by hereditary leaders over several villages without the full machinery of a state, which developed here from around 1000 BC, one of the earliest complex societies in the Americas. The great mounds and the statues belong to the Regional Classic period, about AD 1 to 900, when elite individuals were buried in large stone tombs. Wikipedia gives a narrower guess of AD 5 to 400 for the carving and stresses that much of the area is still unexcavated. Their makers' own name for themselves is lost.\n\nThe research has a long, uneven history. Colombia's Institute of Anthropology and History, ICANH, dates the first written description to the late seventeenth century, when the chronicler Fray Juan de Santa Gertrudis recorded the statues. Wikipedia gives his life as 1724 to 1799 and says he passed through San Agustín in 1756, which would make it the eighteenth century; the two cannot both be right. In 1913 the German ethnologist Konrad Theodor Preuss began systematic work for Berlin's Ethnological Museum, and in 1919 he took 21 smaller sculptures to Berlin; in 2022 Colombia announced that it would seek their return. In 1931 Law 103 created the park and the national archaeological service.\n\nLater work moved from single tombs to whole landscapes. A University of Pittsburgh team led by Robert Drennan walked and test-dug the San Agustín and Isnos district to map where people lived in each period, recording mounds, tombs, statues and sarcophagi with estimates of the labour each took. The archaeologist Víctor González Fernández, studying the Mesitas community, begins the sequence with the Formative 1 period, 1000 to 600 BC, known from burnished pottery, and notes that the Recent period, AD 900 to 1530, kept the same settlement pattern with larger and denser populations.\n\nWhat they found is the turn in this story. The burial mounds show clear differences in prestige, but excavation has found no matching differences in wealth, in the tombs or between households. Offerings in Regional Classic tombs are scant, even in burials guarded by statues. When the sites were rediscovered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, looters tore into most of the monumental tombs looking for treasure, and found very little. UNESCO describes it as an exceptional case of political centralisation \"without the concentration of economic wealth.\" González suggests that leading families tied themselves to founding ancestors who had lived there since the earliest times. Power here rested on lineage and ritual, on who your ancestors were and who spoke for them, rather than on gold.\n\nThat is the mainstream case, and it is a strong one: a sacred land, as UNESCO says, a place of pilgrimage and ancestor worship, where the statues expressed the link between the dead and supernatural power. Yet the core questions remain open. What the statues depict is read rather than known; UNESCO calls them gods or supernatural beings, and some are interpreted as solar and lunar deities. Why statue carving faded after AD 900, even as the population grew, has no agreed answer. The sources even differ on the ending: UNESCO says the sites were abandoned around 1350, while González traces settlement in the region to 1530. UNESCO itself speaks of three properties in one passage and four sites in another.\n\nWhat is certain is the effort. People cut figures weighing several tonnes from volcanic stone and set them over tombs, again and again, for centuries, for leaders who took almost nothing of value into the ground.\n\nStand at the Alto de los Ídolos as the afternoon clouds come in off the massif. Stone figures, the tallest about 7 m, stand over tombs that looters opened long ago, their carved faces unmoved, the old paint almost gone. They have outlasted the name of the people who made them, and they are still on guard.","qs":["How does a whole culture disappear from memory?","What were the statues guarding the dead from?","Why gather statues from across the region in one place?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_A_06.jpg/1280px-Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_A_06.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_A_06.jpg","title":"Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín-Mesita A 06.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Bernard Gagnon","cap":"Statues in Mesita A in San Agustín Archaeological Park, Colombia"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Alto_de_las_Piedras-Doble_Yo_02.jpg/1280px-Alto_de_las_Piedras-Doble_Yo_02.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alto_de_las_Piedras-Doble_Yo_02.jpg","title":"Alto de las Piedras-Doble Yo 02.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Bernard Gagnon","cap":"Doble Yo statue, Alto de las Piedras Archaeological Park, Colombia"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Alto_de_las_Piedras-Mound_III_Dolmen_I_02.jpg/1280px-Alto_de_las_Piedras-Mound_III_Dolmen_I_02.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alto_de_las_Piedras-Mound_III_Dolmen_I_02.jpg","title":"Alto de las Piedras-Mound III Dolmen I 02.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Bernard Gagnon","cap":"Mound III Dolmen I, Alto de las Piedras Archaeological Park, Colombia"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_A_04.jpg/1280px-Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_A_04.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_A_04.jpg","title":"Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín-Mesita A 04.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Bernard Gagnon","cap":"Statue in Mesita A in San Agustín Archaeological Park, Colombia"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bc/Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_B_04.jpg/1280px-Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_B_04.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_B_04.jpg","title":"Parque Arqueológico de San Agustín-Mesita B 04.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","by":"Bernard Gagnon","cap":"Statues in Mesita B, San Agustín Archaeological Park, Colombia"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"600+","u":"statues","h":"Of unknown origin, in one dense burial area","s":[124]},{"v":"7","u":"m","h":"Tallest statue in the park","s":[124]}],"hs":{"124":["Wikipedia: San Agustín Archaeological Park (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Agust%C3%ADn_Archaeological_Park"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/SAM-012.webp","w":1280,"h":853,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_A_06.jpg/1280px-Parque_Arqueol%C3%B3gico_de_San_Agust%C3%ADn-Mesita_A_06.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}