Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (6 March 1912 – 17 May 1994) was an Austrian anthropologist and archaeologist. He is known for his fieldwork among many different Amerindian cultures such as in the Amazonian tropical rainforests (e.g. Desana Tucano), and also among dozens of other indigenous groups in Colombia in the Caribbean Coast (such as the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta), as well as others living in the Pacific Coast, Llanos Orientales, and in the Andean and inter-Andean regions (Muisca) as well as in other areas of Colombia, and he also did research on campesino societies. For nearly six decades he advanced ethnographic and anthropological studies, as well as archeological research, and as a scholar was a prolific writer and public figure renowned as a staunch defender of indigenous peoples. Reichel-Dolmatoff has worked with other archaeologists and anthropologists such as Marianne Cardale de Schrimpff, Ana María Groot, Gonzalo Correal Urrego and others. He died 17 May 1994 in Colombia. Personal life He was born in 1912 in Salzburg, then part of Austria-Hungary, as son of the artist Carl Anton Reichel and Hilde Constance Dolmatoff. Oriented in the classics (Latin and Greek) he did most of his high school at the Benedictine school of Kremsmunster in Austria. He attended classes at the Faculté des Lettres of the Sorbonne and in the École du Louvre from late 1937 to 1938. Gerardo emigrated to Colombia in 1939, where he became a Colombian citizen in 1942. Reichel became member and was the Secretary to the Free France Movement (1942-1943) with the help of his colleague and friend the French ethnologist Paul Rivet who was the Delegate of the Resistance of France Libre and living in Colombia. General Charles De Gaulle later awarded Reichel-Dolmatoff with the medal of the Ordre national du Mérite. The rest of his life Reichel-Dolmatoff spent in research in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, ethnoecology, ethnohistory, ethnoastronomy, material culture, art, vernacular architecture, among others. Career Reichel-Dolmatoff developed a keen interest for conducting fieldwork which would take him and his studies throughout the country, the Caribbean area, La Guajira desert, the Chocó rainforests, the Llanos Orientales, to the mountains of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Amazon rainforests. Some of Reichel-Dolmatoff's archeological research was essential in creating the basic chronological framework for most of the Colombian area, and is still used today. In a trip to the upper Meta River