Tairona culture

Tairona was 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 CE and had significant demographic growth around the 11th century.

The Tairona people formed one of the two principal linguistic groups of the Chibcha family, the other being the Muisca. Genetic and archaeological evidence shows a relatively dense occupation of the region by at least 200 BCE. Pollen data compiled by Luisa Fernanda Herrera in the 1980 shows considerable deforestation and the use of cultigens such as yuca and maiz since possibly 1200 BCE. However, occupation of the Colombian Caribbean coast by sedentary or semi-sedentary populations have been documented to have occurred by c. 4000 BCE. Ethnohistorical data shows that initial contact with the Spanish was tolerated by the Tairona but by the 1600 CE confrontations built and a small part of the Tairona population moved to the higher stretches of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. This movement allowed them to evade the worst of the Spanish colonial system during the 17th and 18th centuries. The indigenous Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuacos (Ijka, Ifca) and Kankuamo people who live in the area today are believed to be direct descendants of the Tairona.

Etymological similarities of the word Tairona survive in the four main linguistic groups of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta: in Sanca Language it is pronounced Teiruna, in Kankuamo language Teijua or Tairuna and in Ijka Teruna, meaning "Males" or "sons of the Tiger".

Although Tairona may be an inaccurate name for the people who inhabited the region during the contact with the Spanish Empire, it has become the most common name for a hierarchical network of villages that developed around 900. Initially it was used to refer to the inhabitants of a valley and probably a chiefdom named Tairo on the northern slope of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. But by the 16th century, the Spanish used it for the whole group of complex chiefdoms in the area. The groups in the northern and western Sierra Nevada were largely indistinguishable to the Spaniards, and became indistinguishable to archaeologists in more modern times.

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