Quimbaya

The Quimbaya were the Indigenous people of the Cauca River valley in present-day Colombia. Settled in the region from around the first century before the common era, they reached their Classic flowering between the 300s and 600s, when their smiths mastered tumbaga, a gold and copper alloy, and cast poporo lime vessels and seated figurines for burial in hollow-tree sarcophagi.

They lived under many small cacicazgos, farmed maize and cassava, and traded metalwork, textiles and river-boiled salt with neighbouring peoples. After an artistic pause the Quimbaya tradition carried these skills into the sixteenth century, when the people of the Cauca resisted the conquistadors of the New Kingdom of Granada after 1539, before being broken and absorbed into colonial society.