Ecuador (Other Keyword)
1-25 (33 Records)
The archaeological study of intercultural encounters in the context of a geographically interstitial zone, such as the Jubones River Basin in present-day Ecuador, elucidates the interconnectedness of multiple historical processes and evaluates the notion that such convergences have existed since antiquity. Preliminary archaeological fieldwork and analysis of the material culture from Potrero Mendieta revealed monumental architecture, and ceramic and lithic traditions that denote cultural...
Anarchy in the Trenches: Perspectives on Buen Suceso (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many ways, Buen Suceso is a unique archaeological site. Not only is it a multicomponent site, with evidence for occupation throughout almost the entirety of the ~2,200-year Valdivia sequence and specialized use by the much later Manteño culture, but it exhibits an occupational...
Arybolas, amphoras and Manteño Ordinario: The production and significance of Ecuadorian transport vessels (2015)
The late prehispanic coastal Ecuadorian societies subsumed as Manteño -Guancavilca, are imagined as seafarers of the Andean region. On balsa rafts they plied a coast dotted with ports; participants in a trading empire. This traditional model of political-economic integration is being challenged with emphasis on regional autonomy and ethnic diversity. It is proposed that the analysis of the "ordinary" Manteño -Guancavilca vessels can contribute to this debate. Large, coarse paste, roughened...
Cochasquí under the Inka: Reassessing the Inka presence in northern Ecuador (2016)
The archaeological site of Cochasquí exhibits some of Ecuador’s largest and most ornate earthen pyramids or Tolas. With long dirt ramps and truncated steps of cangahua blocks, the Cochasquí pyramids are some of the most recognizable in the country. It was at this site that the Inka first encountered and conquered one of the great polities of the Caranqui Confederation. Sometime after its conquest by the Inka, the Spanish arrive and, by all historic accounts, the location was abandoned by 1580...
Cultural implications of neutron activation analysis of ceramics from Palmitopamba, Ecuador (2016)
The cloud forest site of Palmitopamba in northwestern Ecuador was occupied for centuries by the Yumbos prior to the arrival of Incas around 1500. Instrumental neutron activation analysis has been performed on ceramics we have excavated there and which represent those two groups, on a third pottery complex widely identified in Ecuador as Cosanga or Panzaleo, and on raw clay samples from the vicinity of Palmitopamba. The results of some 140 analyses are presented. These imply that the Inca pottery...
Drilling inside the Structure Atop the Mound: A Potential Lapidary Workshop at Buen Suceso (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The lithic materials recovered from Buen Suceso are varied in use types and materials. This paper will focus on the collections of chipped stone drills excavated from the Unit 6 Structure at the site, located on top of a possible mound. The presence of concentrations of these drills in...
Evolving Identities in Early Andean Art: Figurative Ceramics from Ancient Ecuador (2015)
For nearly 5000 years, between c.4,000 BCE and 500 CE, a continuous tradition of figurative ceramics evolved in ancient present-day Ecuador. Though known only through now-anonymous archaeological remains, this tradition represents some of the earliest dated sculptural and ceramic art forms in all of ancient America. At least five distinct, chronologically sequential styles have long been recognized in this tradition, beginning with the earliest Valdivia style and continuing with subsequent...
Exploring the Matter of Mary in Early Colonial Ecuador: Indigenous Appropriations and Material Substrates (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. This paper foregrounds the agency of indigenous peoples in the equatorial Andes in their interactions with the early evangelizers of Christianity. Looking at both historical and contemporary evidence, I consider the material responses of native people to the “unnatural” worldview that...
Fiestas and funerals? Possible uses of a rectangular platform mound in Yumbo territory (2015)
In 2010 the Palmitopamba Archaeology Project in northwestern Pichincha province, Ecuador, was expanded to include excavations in a rectangular platform mound (Tola Rivadeneira, NL-30) 2 km north of the monumental Yumbo and Inca site of Palmitopamba. Earthen mounds (tolas) widely distributed throughout the region, constituted a significant element in the construction of the Yumbo landscape. While recent agricultural work removed the latest occupation of the mound, excavations reveal a history of...
Forgotten mummies. Reflections on the management of human remains exhibits in Ecuadorean museums. (2015)
This paper will address the role of the human remains collections in Ecuadorian archaeological museums through the comparison between the case of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden Holland and three Ecuadorian museums: the National Museum, the Sumpa Lovers museum and the Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño museums. This comparison will be done on the basis of archaeological ethical practice in regards to human remains and the experience and points of view of the museum personnel that work with these...
Incas and Yumbos at Palmitopamba, Tulipe and Other Notable Sites on the Northwestern Periphery of Tawantinsuyo (2018)
Survey and excavation data from the western Pichincha cloud forest of northwestern Ecuador have provided tantalizing evidence of an unusual relationship between Incas and the autochthonous Yumbo populations. The monumental pool site of Tulipe, the terraced hill complex of Palmitopamba, and the pucaras of Chacapata and Capillapamba all provide an extraordinary view of the tentative, late expansion of Tawantinsuyo into the sub-Andean jungle of northern Ecuador. After a dozen seasons of excavation...
Indigenous Labor and the Hacienda System: Examining Everyday Micropolitics and Global Capitalism at the Historic Hacienda Guachalá, Ecuador (2015)
Scholarship in a variety of disciplines pertaining to global flows of people, goods and ideas have begun to emphasize the mediating effects of local communities and cultural logics on and against broader transformations and structural conditions. This topic is of particular importance to an anthropological understanding of both contemporary capitalist processes globally as well as their historical precedents. Recent theoretical approaches to contemporary capitalism, specifically, approach...
Industrial Islands: Ecological Impacts of the steam-powered mills of the El Progreso plantation, Galápagos Islands. (2017)
From 1880 to 1917 "El Progreso" plantation operated on the humid highlands of San Cristóbal Island in the Galápagos archipelago (Ecuador). The plantation enterprise used steam-powered machinery for sugar refining and alcohol distillation. Despite its remote location, 1000 km west from the South American coast, this large operation took advantage of the latest industrial technology. A number of specialized machines were used in sugar processing which were imported from factories in Scotland and...
Inferring the functionality of three prehistoric structures in Rio Blanco Ecuador (2015)
The Manteño culture is associated with the integration period, which is the latest pre-Columbian phase in coastal Ecuador. Much of what is known about the Manteño is their U shaped seats that were used by the elites in ceremonies; however, there is a paucity of information on the function of Manteño structures. With the support of Florida Atlantic University I conducted a survey of sixteen structures in Rio Blanco, Ecuador, of the sixteen sites I performed shovel tests on three of the sites...
Isotopes of Coastal Ecuador (2017)
A preliminary report is presented on research into the diet, health, and mobility patterns for prehistoric coastal Ecuador, based on an analysis of both modern data and archaeological data from Site 035 Salango. An assessment of dietary habits provides insight into a broad range of societal developments, such as the implementation and timing of maize agriculture. Additional insights are provided by an osteological evaluation of human remains, with a particular focus on evidence of pathologies...
Late Formative Craft Production and Interregional Interaction at Las Orquideas, Imbabura, Ecuador (2015)
Scholars long have realized the importance of interregional interaction in Ecuadorian prehistory. While many non-local goods have been recovered that signal interregional interaction, archaeologists rarely have had the opportunity to study the contexts where the production of these artifacts occurred. The recent discovery of intact stratigraphy dating to the Late Formative in the rural barrio of Las Orquideas that includes large quantities of craft production waste will help change our...
A Late Formative Period Site in Chimborazo Province, Ecuador (2017)
Compared to the coastal areas of Ecuador, the central highlands of Ecuador are not well known archaeologically, especially for the Formative Period. This paper will report on preliminary survey and excavation research carried out in the Chibunga River Valley, to the south of the modern city of Riobamba, during the 2009 and 2012 field seasons. Test excavations were carried out at the site of Collay, located on a mesa at 3100 masl, to obtain a sample of material culture and material for dating....
Laying the Foundations: A Unique Inka Construction Technique in the Northern Ecuadorian Highlands (2015)
While Inka architecture is occasionally discussed as if it were a unified corpus of building styles, regional variation is great, with the Inka frequently adopting local techniques. Recent excavations is northern Ecuador have uncovered examples of a little documented Inka foundation style found at several sites in the region. At Hacienda Guachalá, where local legends maintain that the hacienda chapel, reportedly one of the oldest in Ecuador, was built atop an Inka temple, the early colonial...
Local and Inca Cross Regional Interactions: studies from the Northern Ecuador frontier. (2015)
This paper focuses on the importance of interregional contact along border zones as we seek to understand the nature and impacts of interactions between cultural worlds. We are particularly concerned with how archaeologists construct and methodologically recover evidence of these interactions. Ultimately, and not surprisingly, people within these zones show innovative ways of expanding, exploiting or resisting transfers of knowledge, styles, technologies, raw materials and material culture. ...
Local Communities, Ceramic Use, and the Uneven Development of Social Complexity in the Late Valdivia Period of Coastal Ecuador (2015)
The Late Valdivia period of the coast of Ecuador is often portrayed as one of movement, as sites in the former "heartland" adjacent to the Santa Elena Peninsula were abandoned and new, larger sites were founded at the former peripheries to the north and south. These new sites are implicated in the development of incipient social hierarchy within Valdivia society. However, recent research at the site of Buen Suceso in the Manglaralto Valley suggests that this process of developing social...
Message in a Bottle: Assessing the Impacts of Looting on the Archaeological Record of the Jama River Valley, Coastal Ecuador. (2015)
Northern Manabí Province of coastal Ecuador has long been a center of archaeological looting and illicit trade in antiquities derived from successive cultural occupations of the Formative Period Valdivia and Chorrera cultures and the long Jama-Coaque cultural tradition, a sequence spanning some 3,500 years. The ceramic artifacts from this trade are some of the most complex and elaborate found anywhere in Ecuador. They grace the shelves of national and regional museums, and numerous private...
Monumental Haciendas: The Spanish Colonial Transformation of Pre-Columbian Seats of Power in Northern Ecuador (2018)
Early Spanish colonial accounts of northern highland Ecuador were exceptionally verbose about Inka imperial frontier architectural feats, however these same writings are silent on regional ethnic groups’ pre-Inka monumental earthen platform mound creations, known as tolas. This is in exceptional contrast to the detail provided in then-contemporary Spanish accounts of similar earthen structures in the U.S. Southeastern Woodlands. Tolas could tower over the regional landscape up to 20 m tall and...
New bioarchaeological evidence for Guangala and Manteño-Huancavilca Cultures in Santa Elena peninsula (Southern Ecuadorian coast). (2015)
In this contribution we present the preliminary results of a study that addresses the funerary practices and the osteobiographical profile of various sites from Guangala culture (Regional Development Period, 300 BC-800AD) and Manteño-Huancavilca culture (Integration Period, 800AD-1530AD). In this case, we have investigated human remains from the Guangala site OGSE-46 from Samarina, several locations from the Manteño-Huancavilca period in La Libertad (OGSE-47) and Chanduy; most of them have not...
Over the Andes, and Through their Goods: Integration Period Relations in Northern Ecuador (2018)
While highland Peru’s Late Intermediate Period (AD 1000-1400) is characterized by community isolation, regional violence and shrinking exchange networks, the contemporary northern Ecuadorian Late Integration Period was a time of large-scale interregional activity that saw the flourishing of market economies. The northern Ecuadorian Andes demonstrated highly diverse cultural practices amongst an intimately connected Barbacoan world that stretched from between the highlands of northern Ecuador and...
Prisons in the Galápagos? Digital Archaeology of the Penal Colony of Isabela (1946-1959) (2023)
This is an abstract from the session entitled "In Small Islands Forgotten: Insular Historical Archaeologies of a Globalizing World", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology. Islands have been used by societies around the world to abandon, exile, or relocate people. In Latin America, an ambiguous sovereign status and the geographical remoteness of islands were used as the perfect place to create violent repressive institutions during the 19th and 20th centuries....