Nemocón

Nemocón is a municipality and town of Colombia in the Central Savanna Province, part of the department of Cundinamarca. Nemocón, famous for its salt mine, was an important village in the Muisca Confederation, the country in the central Colombian Andes before the arrival of the Spanish. The municipality is situated in the northern part of the Bogotá savanna, part of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense with its urban centre at an altitude of and from the capital Bogotá. Nemocón is the northeasternmost municipality of the Metropolitan Area of Bogotá and the Bogotá River originates close to Nemocón. The median temperature of Nemocón is 12.8 °C. The municipality borders Tausa in the north, Suesca and Gachancipá in the east, Tocancipá and Zipaquirá in the south and in the west the rivers Checua and Neusa and the municipality of Cogua. Nemocón is derived from Enemocón and means "The cry or sadness of the warrior" in the Chibcha language. Another etymology is that the town is named after zipa Nemequene. Archaeological evidence surfaced by Gonzalo Correal Urrego in 1979 and Ana María Groot in 1992 has shown that Nemocón was inhabited early in the history of inhabitation of the Altiplano Cundiboyacense. One of the oldest evidence of human settlement; lithic scraper tools, bone tools and the remains of food of the hunter-gatherers (deer, foxes, jaguars and rodents) has been dated at 7640 BP. The inhabitants of the area lived under rock shelters, similar to Tequendama. Checua The archaeological site Checua, at north from the urban centre of Nemocón, provided evidence carbon dated at around 6500 BCE. First researcher of Checua was Colombian anthropologist and archaeologist Ana María Groot. In later years other archaeological sites have been found. Rock art has been discovered at various sites in Nemocón, among others at the border with Suesca. This lithic period, part of the Andean preceramic, predates the Herrera Period of which archaeological evidence has been found by Marianne Cardale de Schrimpff in 1975, 1976 and the 1980s.