Calima culture in the context of Valle del Cauca

Repoussé (French: [ʁəpuse] ) or repoussage ([ʁəpusaʒ] ) is a metalworking technique in which a malleable metal is shaped by hammering from the reverse side to create a design in low relief. Chasing (French: ciselure) or embossing is a similar technique in which the piece is hammered on the front side, sinking the metal. The two techniques are often used in conjunction.

Many metals can be used for chasing and repoussé work, including gold, silver, copper, and alloys such as steel, bronze, and pewter.

The Museum of Gold (Spanish: Museo del Oro) is an archaeology museum located in Bogotá, Colombia. It is one of the most visited touristic highlights in the country. The museum receives around 500,000 tourists per year.

The museum displays a selection of pre-Columbian gold and other metal alloys, such as Tumbaga, and contains the largest collection of gold artifacts in the world in its exhibition rooms on the second and third floors. Together with pottery, stone, shell, wood and textile objects, these items, made of what indigenous cultures considered to be a sacred metal, testify to the life and thought of the different societies which lived in present-day Colombia before the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Many indigenous groups did not consider gold to be a source of wealth, but rather held the belief it was charged with symbolic and religious values. The Spaniards, for example, reported the Inca royal family claimed to be descendants of the sun and the moon, and that gold was the “sweat of the sun” and silver the “tears of the moon.”

The Muisca agriculture describes the agriculture of the Muisca, the advanced civilisation that was present in the times before the Spanish conquest on the high plateau in the Colombian Andes; the Altiplano Cundiboyacense. The Muisca were a predominantly agricultural society with small-scale farmfields, part of more extensive terrains. To diversify their diet, they traded mantles, gold, emeralds and salt for fruits, vegetables, coca, yopo and cotton cultivated in lower altitude warmer terrains populated by their neighbours, the Muzo, Panche, Guane, Guayupe, Lache, Sutagao and U'wa. Trade of products grown farther away happened with the Calima, Pijao and Caribbean coastal communities around the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta.

Important scholars who have contributed to the knowledge about the Muisca agriculture have been Pedro Simón, Marianne Cardale de Schrimpff, Carl Henrik Langebaek and Sylvia Broadbent.