The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

Chiefdoms
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they had was that in each pueblo they obeyed the wealthiest and bravest Indian,
and this person is their commander in war. 72
War chiefs were converted into permanent officers by colonial officials,
but they became functionaries with little support on the part of their
own people.
The Temporal Dimension
Chiefdoms varied in distribution, complexity, and domain not only
spatially but over time as well. More centralized polities than those the
Europeans encountered had existed in prior epochs in the Moxos region
of lowland Bolivia, Marajo Island, and the Orinoco Llanos. In Colombia
sociopolitical and material complexity in the upper Magdalena mountainous
region and in the Cauca Valley, particularly El Valle, may have
been most highly developed between the last centuries of the first millennium
B.C.E. and the eleventh century C.E., with larger cultural units and
political entities than existed thereafter. A period of regional development
then followed and lasted until the arrival of the Europeans, with further
late precontact-period simplification in some places. In the Calima River
area, peoples of the Yotoco-Calima culture (c.E. 100-1200) appear to
have been more politically and technologically complex than the unrelated
groups that followed in the Sonso Period or the culturally related
sixteenth-century Gorrones. Similarly, in the Cundi-Tolimense portion
of the Magdalena River, people of the Tolima culture (first millennium
C.E.) had more complex polities than did the Pijao groups encountered
by Spanish expeditions in the sixteenth century.
In the Pasto region of southern Colombia, differential burials indicating
the presence of commoners, specialists, and elites with access to exotic
goods suggest a more highly ranked set of polities during the time of
Piartal culture (c.E. 750-1250) than those that followed in the Tuzo
phase or in the sixteenth-century Pasto chiefdoms met by Europeans.
In contrast, in the Cordillera Oriental of Colombia, a tendency toward
increased centralization patterns began to occur in the second millennium
C.E. among the Chibcha, Guane, Lache, and Tunebo peoples and
continued until the sixteenth century. The course that centralization and
72 Aguado, Recopilacidn Historial, I, 465.
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