in the Orinoco plains in 1940, he conducted research and later published the earliest studies done on the Guahibo Indians. In 1943 Gerardo wrote his first article on the Muisca settlement of Soacha. That same year, together with his wife anthropologist and archeologist Alicia Dussán, he conducted an analysis on pre-Columbian burial urns of the Magdalena River. Working in the Tolima region inhabited by Amerindians and the renowned indigenous leader Quintin Lame, they also published a study indicating the indigenous culture of the local populations and also indicated the blood type variations among the indigenous groups of the Pijao in the Department of Tolima as further proof of their Amerindian identity as these tribes were arguing over rights to their ancestral territories. Switching residency to the city of Santa Marta in 1946, the Reichel-Dolmatoffs created and headed the Instituto Etnologico del Magdalena in 1945 and created also a small museum about the anthropology and archeology of the Sierra Nevada region. Reichel-Dolmatoff wrote a two volume monography of the Kogi Indians in the 1940s which to this day is considered a classic reference. For the next five years, Gerardo and his colleague and wife conducted research throughout the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta region, focusing particularly on the Tairona descendants, the Kogui, also known as the Kogi or Kaggaba, and also worked with the Arhuaco and Wiwa indigenous groups, as well as ethnography of a peasant community among the people of Aritama (Kankuamo). Reichel-Dolmatoff carried out a regional study of the area covering archeology, ethnohistory and anthropology, making it one of the first such regional studies made in Colombia. Reichel also did research in the Pacific coast and studied amongst others the Kuna of the Caiman Nuevo River, west of the Gulf of Urabá. Several years later, Reichel published ethnohistorical studies and anthropological research related to the Kogi, demonstrating their connections to ancestral Tairona chiefdoms. In the late 1950s, Reichel and his family moved to the coastal city of Cartagena. Reichel taught classes in medical anthropology at the university there and engaged in programs of public health with an anthropological perspective. Actively involved in archeological excavations in the Caribbean region around Cartagena, in 1954, the Reichel-Dolmatoffs located and also excavated, amongst others, the Barlovento site, which was the first early Formative shell-midden site found in Colombia. At Momil, they conducted the first study of societies engaged in a subsistence change from