Chiribiquete: The Paintings in the Rock

“Among Schultes's discoveries was the tepui plateau Chiribiquete, now the world's largest rainforest national park, containing the largest known repository of pre-Columbian rock paintings. He found it in the 1940s. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018.”

In the early 1940s, while traveling through the Colombian Amazon on his rubber-tapping assignment, Richard Evans Schultes encountered a massive sandstone plateau that rose from the jungle floor like a fortress. The Chiribiquete tepui, a table mountain in the style of the Guyana Highlands, was unknown to Western science and was home to extraordinary biodiversity and extraordinary archaeology: thousands of years of rock paintings in ochre and red, covering exposed cliff faces with images of animals, humans, rituals, and what appeared to be shamanic vision content.

Schultes documented what he found and moved on. He had rubber to track and plants to catalog. The Chiribiquete plateau was one discovery among many.

The plateau's significance took decades to fully emerge. Colombian archaeologist Gaspar Morcote-Ríos has spent years studying the rock paintings, which extend across hundreds of sites and represent one of the most extensive archives of pre-Columbian visual culture in South America. Some of the oldest paintings may date to 20,000 years before present, among the oldest rock art in the Americas.

In 2018, UNESCO designated Chiribiquete a World Heritage Site. The park is now the world's largest rainforest national park, covering more than four million hectares. It protects three groups of uncontacted indigenous peoples and extraordinary levels of biodiversity, including plant species that Schultes documented and that have never been fully analyzed pharmacologically.

The Harvard Magazine obituary of Schultes in 2022 used Chiribiquete as the emblem of his legacy: a place he found in the 1940s that became, seventy years later, a globally recognized conservation priority. His presence in the Amazon was not destructive tourism, it was discovery that eventually enabled protection.

Sources

• Harvard Magazine, Schultes obituary (2001)
• UNESCO, Chiribiquete National Park designation (2018)
• Wikipedia, Chiribiquete National Park