Ancestral Technology: Inside Colombia’s Hidden Technological Landscape

Abstract

Luz Marina Burgos’ fingers moved deliberately across the threads, constructing a tšombiach—a ceremonial sash commonly used to protect and strengthen the body. “This is the frog; to us, it represents fertility,” she explained, pointing to an emerging pattern. “This is the sun. Families weave it differently. This is how the tšombiach helps us tell our own story.” What I witnessed in this Colombian village was not simply craft—it was a technology for encoding and transmitting intergenerational knowledge.

Passing most of my time between MIT and Harvard created a sense of technology as merely technical or socio-technical systems serving as a means to undetermined progress that only a few seem able to influence or have power over. A sense of relentless push towards the new, often at the expense of the old. Learning from Luz Marina, a traditional weaver from the Quillasinga Indigenous people, helped me make sense of radically different technological values, motivations and purposes. She is part of a centuries-long tradition of sustaining technologies designed for a different purpose entirely: cultural preservation. These technological systems solve immediate problems while maintaining the social fabric that makes problem-solving possible across generations.

During five years of fieldwork in Colombia’s rural communities —ultimately leading to my doctoral dissertation— I encountered technologies that function according to entirely different logics than those driving “modern” narratives of innovation. I began —along with my collaborators in Colombia— conceptualizing these as “ancestral technologies”: forms of world-making —some of which take the form of artifacts— that primarily support cultural cohesion, remain rooted in specific geographies and carry their history through collective memory. Unlike modern technologies optimized for profit, efficiency or scale, these ancestral systems optimize for continuity and collective meaning. In an era when predictive technology sells the fantasy that unlimited computational power must be our goal as a society, perhaps the question is not whether we can build more powerful systems, but whether we can build systems that help us preserve what matters most.