Muisca

The Muisca (referred to in the past as Chibcha) are an Indigenous community predating Columbus and colonial communities of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense before the Spanish colonization of the Americas, whose visibility from public eye lasted up to the beginning of the 19th century and Colombian independence. Though widely believed among academics to have been decimated in culture, language, and tradition, many Indigenous peoples in Colombia have maintained traditions privately through complex social and urban networks. Due to recent advances in Indigenous issues, the community has been formally recognized and undergoing a process of cultural re-definition and revitalization. The Muisca traditionally speak Muysccubun, a language of the Chibchan language family, also called Muysca and Mosca. The first known contact with Europeans in the region was in 1537 during the Spanish conquest of New Granada. In New Spain, Spanish clerics and civil officials had a major impact on the Muisca, attempting to Christianize and incorporate them into the Spanish Empire as subjects. Postconquest Muisca culture underwent significant changes due to the establishment of the New Kingdom of Granada. Sources for the Muisca are far less abundant than for the Aztec Empire of Mesoamerica or the Inca Empire and their incorporation to the Spanish Empire during the colonial era. In the New Kingdom of Granada and into the colonial era, the Muisca became "the official 'tribe' of the Colombian nation" and "a local version of the Aztecs and Incas". Recent scholarship on the Muisca, understood to have been a confederation rather than an empire, by archeologists, anthropologists, and historians is revising the understanding of the Muiscas' prehispanic and colonial era past.