This article is about the mobilityof hunter-gatherers and cultivators, who inhabited two regions of mountain rainforest in the Cordillera Central of Colombia between the early and middle Holocene. It aims to demonstrate that in tropical rainforests mobility is a more effective economic and social strategy than sedentary settlement. Given the poor soils and low carrying capacity of these environments, mobility provides a strategy which allows for periodic regeneration of resources. We argue that the hunter-gatherer cultivators who lived in the valleys of the Porce and middle Cauca maintained mobility even though the first evidence for cultivars appears between 7000 BP and 6000 BP. The later introduction of sedentary settlement was not due to plant cultivation, but rather to other factors such as the necessity to control territorial resources. Social factors thus played their part in influencing the reduction of mobility to produce the settlement patterns described by the Spanish chroniclers across the stud...