Acceso usuarios
Roberto Santos
El Territorio ancestral de la cultura Mhuysqa en Colombia abarca una gran parte de lo que hoy son los departamentos de Cundinamarca, Boyacá y el sur de Santander (Mapa 1). Un extenso territorio sobre la cordillera oriental (Mapa 2), equivalente al área de Portugal (aproximadamente 90.000 km2.), en el cual se han identificado más de 500 antiguos poblados (Mapa 3) en conexión con más de 450 pequeñas y grandes lagunas, páramos -entre ellos SUNAPA (Sumapáz), el más grande a nivel mundial-, montañas nevadas, ríos y quebradas de las cuencas hidrográficas de los ríos Magdalena, al noreste y Orinoco, al suroeste. Una orografía propicia para el desarrollo de la cultura Mhuysqa, con un legado que ha perdurado hasta nuestros días en la toponimia y en la forma armónica cómo se relacionaron con el territorio.
This paper seeks to understand the ancestral order of the Mhuysqa territory in central Colombia. For indigenous peoples, sacred places have always been the natural spaces from which the territory is organized according to its spiritual and material principles.The Mhuysqa culture has developed in a physical space that is characterized by a diversity of sanctuaries in valleys and mountains, with countless lagoons and rivers that bathe its extensive geography. For this living culture, the sun and the moon are the divinities whose energy on Earth generates life. Its cosmogony determines the implantation of the solar and lunar temples in the territory, the astronomical observatories and the towns, in correspondence with the solstices, equinoxes, solar quarters and lunistices. The first approximation to this conception of the world corresponds to archaeoastronomy. With these maps of sacred geography, with the original toponymy and the understanding of its meaning from the autochthonous language (Mhuysqhubun), the aim is to recover the memory that the ancestors evoked. The oral tradition of its inhabitants is the primary key that has helped to decipher the geometries and centers that order the entire ancestral territory. However, nowadays, it is sad to see that land use plans ignore them as sacred natural places; and that some of the most important ones, that, at the time, gave shape and origin to the harmonious relationship with the territory, are dying of oblivion and abandonment into which they fell as a consequence of the historical break and the subsequent denial of their roots and their own identity. We can not love what we do not know.
