shifting cultivation (manioc) to corn agriculturalists. After returning to live in Bogotá in 1960 Reichel was the founder, professor, and first Chair the first Department of Anthropology in Colombia. Reichel did archeological excavations at the site of Puerto Hormiga where they discovered the earliest dated pottery in all of the New World (at that time), -dated over 5 thousand years old- which indicated that pottery had been first developed in the Caribbean coast of Colombia and then spread elsewhere to the rest of the Americas (and hence was not brought through diffusion from the Old World as had been formerly suggested by other archeologists) .(Reichel see biblio). Reichel also excavated in other sites including in San Agustin, Huila. He published his analyses of the Puerto Hormiga site regarding early Formative cultures, and of the San Agustin site regarding chiefdoms. Reichel also produced one of the first overviews of Colombian archeology and proposed an interpretive framework of its millenarian pre-historic past. In 1963, Reichel and his wife taught courses in anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes, and then in 1964 formally created the first Department of Anthropology in Colombia at the university in Bogotá. Reichel-Dolmatoff worked for 5 years at the Department and left together with his wife and several other professors due to changes in the Department. Reichel received a short visiting fellowship to Cambridge University in 1970 and became an adjunct professor at the Anthropology Department of the University of California in Los Angeles. During the 1960s and until the mid-1990s Reichel-Dolmatoff advanced research on Amerindian shamanism, indigenous modes of life, ethnoecology, and on cosmologies and worldviews, and he also did research on hallucinogens related to shamanism, entheogens, ethnoastronomy, ethnobotany, ethnozoology, and on the vernacular architecture of temples and of the Amazonian 'maloca' longhouses; additionally he did research on the shamanic symbolism of pre-Columbian goldwork, as well as other Amerindian artifacts and material culture, including basketry. Reichel-Dolmatoff was a member of the Colombian Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Associate Member of the NAS National Academy of Sciences of the United States and he was also a member of the Academia Real Española de Ciencias. He was awarded the Thomas H. Huxley medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in 1975. Reichel-Dolmatoff was the single author of 40 books and of over 400 articles, all dedicated to the archeology and anthropology of Colombia and