Muisca architecture

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This article describes the architecture of the Muisca. The Muisca, inhabiting the central highlands of the Colombian Andes (Altiplano Cundiboyacense and the southwestern part of that the Bogotá savanna), were one of the four great civilizations of the Americas.^[1] Unlike the three civilizations in present-day Mexico and Peru (the Aztec, Maya, and the Incas), they did not construct grand architecture of solid materials. While specialising in agriculture and gold-working, cloths and ceramics, their architecture was rather modest and made of non-permanent materials as wood and clay.

Evidence for the Muisca architecture relies on archaeological excavations performed since the mid 20th century. In recent years larger areas showing evidence of the Early Muisca architecture have been uncovered, the biggest of them in Soacha, Cundinamarca.^[2][3] All of the original houses and temples have been destroyed by the Spanish conquerors and replaced with colonial architecture. Reconstructions of some houses (bohíos) and the most important temple in the Muisca religion; the Temple of the Sun in Sogamoso, called Sugamuxi by the Muisca, have been built in the second half of the 20th century.

Notable scholars who have contributed to the knowledge about the Muisca architecture are Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada, who made the first contact with the Muisca, early 17th century friars Pedro Simón and Juan de Castellanos later bishop Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita and modern archaeologists Eliécer Silva Celis, Sylvia Broadbent, Carl Henrik Langebaek and others.