The Absent Idols

Empty spots wait for monuments in the National Museum.

To commemorate a century of arqueological investigations in San Agustin, the National Museum has an exhibit on about the storied monuments. The exhibition includes images and lots of historical and anthropological information - but no monuments, or even reproductions of them.

Their absence is due to opposition by San Agustin area residents, who blocked the temporary transfer of some monuments to Bogotá, fearing that they could be damaged or not returned. The museum describes the locals' attitude as selfish. But the Sanagustinianos remember well that dozens of San Agustin statues were taken away in the early 1900s and remain in storage in Gemany.

The San Agustin monuments, located in Huila Department near the town of San Agustin, were created between about the time of Christ and 900 a.d. According to the museum exhibition, they may have been created by several different cultures. Nobody's sure what the figures represent or who created them, but climate change apparently played a key role in the cultural flowering and decline. According to the exhibition, the great period of monument building coincided with a time of abundant rainfall and good harvests.

An artist's rendering of an indigenous man
before the arrival of the Spanish.

The Sanagustianos' insistance on controlling the statues also suggests some questions about ownership of natural and artistic resources. There's no evidence that the people now living near the monuments are related to the ancient monuments' creators. So, why should they have any more right to control the monuments than someone from Bogotá, Medellin, or even New York? In this sense, are ancient monuments any different from gold or coal deposits? Nobody put them there, either?

In any case, those interested in seeing San Agustin monuments in Bogotá can visit replicas in the Los Martires district. 

Information about European and Colombian writing and research about the monuments. 

Altho the first Europeans visited the area in the 1530s and described the monuments, German ethnologist Konrad Theodor Preuss is considered to have done the first investigations in 1913.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

A 100th Anniversary for a Millenial Site

Researchers in San Agustin in 1946 (Photo: El Espectador)

The Parque San Agustin in Huila Province is celebrating the 100th anniversary of scientific research about the site's famed 2,000-year-old monoliths. For its own part, Bogotá's own San Agustin Park in the Santa Fe neighborhood is passing a more modest first birthday.

Monuments in San Agustin, Huila Province.

Huila's San Agustin archeological park is the only place in Colombia with pre-Columbian monuments. But their makers remain a mystery. The people, called Agustinianos after the present-day town nearby, created about 300 stone monuments between about the first and eighth centuries after Christ. Then, their civilization disappeared, perhaps pressured by the invasion of other peoples, climate change or other causes.

San Agustin in Bogotá.

The Swiss writer Erich Von Däniken, who saw extraterrestrial influences in many ancient human civilizations, credited aliens with influencing the ancient Agustinianos. Others have theorized about Mayan, Egyptian or even Viking connections. All those speculations, which have little evidence, short-change the native Colombians, who undoubtedly were capable of creating magnificent stone monuments without outside help. Researchers theorize that the monuments were used for ancestor worship and may have represented reincarnation. Many mix human and feline charcteristics, suggesting the mixing of human and animal spirits. Perhaps the monuments provided gateways between this world and the next.

A bicycle tourist
beside the famous
'Doble Yo' figure.

The monuments in Bogotá's own park, which is located in the very urban Santa Fe neighborhood behind the Central Cemetery and just a few blocks from the red light district, have a better-known origin: They were created by local sculptors, including some of the people who carve headstones nearby.

For the rest of this year, the San Agustin Archeological Park in Huila plans to commemorate the Colombian and foreign archeologists who began researching the region in 1913. Research there continues, and probably will never end.

Perhaps more significant for us than the original Agustinianos' origin was their disappearance. Like the Mayans and the monument builders of Easter Island, the Agustinians were replaced by a much simpler culture incapable or uninterested in creating such massive objects. 

Did the original Agustinianos fall victim to climate change? Overpopulation? War? Environmental destruction? We may never know. But, for a nation like Colombia challenged by many of these problems and others, the Agustinianos' disappearance serves as a warning about preserving the environment and finding peaceable means to end conflict. 


While Huila's San Agustin region appears bucolic, much of rural Colombia suffers from erosion, pollution, deforestation and desertification. And Bogotá's Santa Fe neighborhood captures many urban ills, including litter, air and noise pollution. Sometimes, it seems, cities like Bogotá are carrying out an experiment in how a species can poison itself in its own wastes.

This figure, in Bogotá's Santa Fe neighborhood, appears to suffer from an indeterminate gender.

The Bogotá park is a green island amidst urban noise and pollution. 

Posing with a face. 

These figures might represent male midwives, or gods devouring infants. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours