Carl Henrik Langebaek


Carl Henrik Langebaek Rueda is a Colombian anthropologist, archaeologist and historian. He has been contributing on the knowledge of archaeological evidences, especially the Herrera Period and the Muisca. Langebaek is vice-chancellor for academic affairs at Universidad de los Andes and speaks Spanish and English.

Biography

Carl Henrik Langebaek Rueda was born in the Colombian capital Bogotá as son of a Danish father, also an anthropologist, and Colombian mother. He attended the Gimnasio Moderno in the city. Langebaek did his undergraduate studies in anthropology at the Universidad de Los Andes from 1980 to 1985 and his Master's from 1988 to 1993 at the University of Pittsburgh, graduating with a thesis called Regional Archaeology in the Muisca Territory. The case of Fúquene and Susa. During the same years Langebaek performed his doctoral publishing his PhD thesis in 1993 under the title Patterns of Coca consumptions in Northern South America. The anthropologist has spent eight years in the archives looking for information on the indigenous peoples he assessed in his work.
Since 1992 Langebaek is associate professor at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá and from 2000 to 2011 he was the dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the university.
Langebaek has worked in National Park Tayrona, Fúquene Valley, Barichara, Bahía de Neguaje and north Ecuador and his heroes are Charles Darwin and Niels Bohr.
Carl Henrik Langebaek has stated that agriculture and the hunter-gatherer society are not mutually exclusive and while the access to agriculture is there, the society can continue living off hunter-gathering techniques. The potato and maize are not originally from Colombia, yet from Peru and Mexico respectively and were cultivated on the Altiplano Cundiboyacense during the Herrera Period, around 3000 BP.
In 2009 the Premio Alejandro Ángel Escobar en Ciencias Sociales y Humanas was awarded to Langebaek for his book Los herederos del pasado. Indígenas y pensamiento criollo en Colombia y Venezuela.

Works

This list is a selection.

Books

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