Quimbaya

The Quimbaya were an ancient Indigenous people of Colombia's middle Cauca country, famed across the ancient world for goldwork of uncanny precision. From about 500 BCE to 1600 CE they cast tumbaga, a gold-copper alloy, into lime containers, staff heads, musical instruments and the celebrated airplanes of the Tolima style, detailed down to feathers and fangs. Their chiefdoms farmed maize, beans and avocado on volcanic slopes between two cordilleras, burying their dead with modelled pottery faces that stare, individual and alert, from museum cases today. The Quimbaya traded salt and gold along the Cauca corridor linking the Andes with the Pacific lowlands. Spanish conquest shattered the chiefdoms in the 16th century; the famous Treasure of the Quimbayas sailed to Spain, where most of it survives in Madrid. Descendant communities of the coffee region keep the name, and archaeologists still read social rank in the weight of gold buried with each body.