Republic of Ecuador (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
726-750 (2,078 Records)
I present new data of investigations conducted in two almost unexplored zones on both coasts (Pacific and Caribbean) of the Greater Chiriquí Region. An exploratory survey, and test pit excavations of selected sites in the southern coast of Caribbean Costa Rica, allowed recording materials similar to those found on the Pacific coast. This reaffirms the proposed extension of related groups on both sides of the Talamanca mountain range. I provide comments about the relationships maintained between...
From Cooking to Smelting, the Social Technology of Pyrotechnology of Earth Ovens (2018)
The effects of earth ovens on societies is a topic that has not been consider much, mainly because the limitation of archaeological findings. Because our research has been mainly concentrated in floodplains environments, we have been successful in recovering a large sample that allows to propose explanations on the variability of them, and the relationship that features have in understanding some basic aspects of the social characteristic of the societies that created them. As a study case, we...
From Discrete Frontiers to Cross-Cutting Religious Networks: Religious Monuments and Cultural Syncretism in the Peruvian North Coast and Highland, Ninth to Eleventh Centuries AD (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Them and Us: Transmission and Cultural Dynamism in the North of Peru between AD 250 and 950: A Vision since the Recent Northern Investigations" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Colonialist perspectives of territorial expansion envision the political entities as spatially defined by discrete frontier boundaries. Under this approach, the distribution of objects a given cultural style parallels the area of influence of the...
From Dune Stratigraphy to a Model-Based Cultural Sequence for the Marquesas Islands of East Polynesia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Marquesas Islands comprise part of East Polynesia, a culture area that also includes Hawai'i, New Zealand, and Tahiti. Calcareous sand dunes are rare in the Marquesas but play an outsized role in Polynesian archaeology. Dune sites yield remarkably rich evidence of human settlement and the preservation of organic remains is...
From Heartland to Province: Assessing Inca Political Economy through Material Culture Signatures (2018)
Archaeological studies of Inca hegemony often focus on the intensity or degree of "Incanization," or assimilation to Inca material culture. These studies particularly rely upon well-preserved and highly visible remains, especially well-fired polychrome ceramics and monumental architecture. While Inca scholars have begun to analyze Inca hegemony in theoretically sophisticated ways that reveal how material culture legitimizes imperial rule, these approaches present several weaknesses: (1) sampling...
From Hunting to Herding in the Lake Titicaca Basin: A Preliminary Investigation of Faunal Assemblages, 9.0–3.5 ka (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Interdisciplinary Approaches in Zooarchaeology: Addressing Big Questions with Ancient Animals" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the sole large-bodied animal domesticate in South America, camelids constituted a central component in Andean socio-economies and were pivotal for the expansion of early complex societies. The timing and nature of domestication, as well as the subsequent spread of husbandry practices,...
From Kotosh to Pacopampa: Sixty-Years of Japanese Investigations on the Andean Formative (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of Archaeologists in the Andes: Second Symposium, the Institutionalization and Internationalization of Andean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From the excavations at Kotosh during the 1960’s, the University of Tokyo school of Andean Archaeology has consistently carried out large-scale archaeological researches focusing mainly on the Formative Period of the central Andes. All the archaeologists...
From Los Tapiales to Cuncaicha: Terminal Pleistocene humans in America’s high-elevation western mountains (2017)
Among Ruth Gruhn’s remarkable archaeological accomplishments has been the investigation of the first truly high-elevation Paleoindian sites discovered in the Americas. The open-air camps of Los Tapiales and La Piedra del Coyote in the Guatemalan highlands, located respectively at 3150 and 3300 meters above sea level, contained fluted Fishtail projectile points and rich, diverse tool and flake assemblages. Importantly, both sites were securely dated to ~12,500 cal BP, indicating early use of...
From Mountain Worship to Guarding the Sacred Lakes: Surveys of Cerro Canoncillo, Cerro Prieto Espinal, and Cerro Santonte (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Bridging Time, Space, and Species: Over 20 Years of Archaeological Insights from the Cañoncillo Complex, Jequetepeque Valley, Peru, Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the heart of the community, Cerro Cañoncillo and its lakes formed enduring sacred spaces across the landscape. In this paper, we explore in greater depth how the ceremonial centers of the region interrelated spatially and symbolically with...
From Mud to Brick, or the Transformative Possibilities of Assembling Architecture (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper considers the often-overlooked practice of building, in order to rethink the role of architecture as a mere container of sociality, a proxy for domestic stability or the precondition of social complexity. By focusing on the building of a wall in the site of Ramaditas, a 2,000-year-old site in the Atacama Desert, this work seeks to question...
From Near and Far: Application of Archaeometric Techniques to Characterize Regional and Long-Distance Interaction at the Formative Period Center of Atalla, Peru (2018)
This paper investigates the role of interregional interaction in the development of social complexity in the Central Andes during the Late Initial (c.1100-800 BC) and Early Horizon (c.800-200 BC) periods at the archaeological site of Atalla, a regional ceremonial center located in highlands of Huancavelica, Peru. Methodologically, this research integrates radiocarbon dating with stylistic, technical, and geochemical analyses of a range of materials to examine exchange and interaction on multiple...
From Pozuelo to Paracas: An Approach to the Processes of Formation and Social Complexity in Early Societies in the Chincha Valley (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Thinking Big in the Andes: Papers in Honor of Charles Stanish" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Paracas, believed to be the oldest complex society on the southern coast of Peru, occupied the Chincha Valley during part of the Formative Period (400–200 BCE). Although there is evidence of the Paracas occupation throughout the Chincha Valley, little is known about the formation of Paracas within the valley. Relatively...
From Pukaras to Polities: Exploring Late Prehispanic Andean Hillforts through Large Scale Network Analysis (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Applications of Network Analysis" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper employs network analysis to explore the sociopolitical dynamics of the late prehispanic south-central Andes through the lens of 1,400 hilltop fortifications. Hilltop fortifications in the Andean highlands, known as pukaras, are emblematic of the Late Intermediate period (1000–1450 CE) and Late Horizon (1450–1532 CE). Focusing on...
From Roads to Ritual: Comparing Logics and Scale of GIS Analyses of Inka Imperial Landscapes (2017)
During their expansion throughout the Andes, the Inka Empire restructured a cultural and physical landscape to meet objectives of logistical and ideological control over their subjects. While this process is embodied by archaeological features such as large-scale infrastructure and the strategic positioning of sacred places, interpreting these datasets require appropriately scaled analyses for which GIS is uniquely suited. In this paper, I explore this topic by comparing two geospatial analyses,...
From Slavery to Servitude: Approaching Hacienda Worker Health through Transformations in Labor and Foodways in Nineteenth-Century South Coastal Peru (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Approaches to the Archaeology of Health: Sewers, Snakebites, and Skeletons" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The nineteenth century was a dynamic period for hacienda workers on the south coast of Peru. Once Jesuit vineyards with two of the largest enslaved Afro-descended populations in rural coastal Peru, the haciendas of San José and San Javier and their annexes in Nasca’s Ingenio Valley underwent dramatic changes with...
From Tasmania to Tucson: new directions in ethnoarchaeology (1978)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
From Technological Style to Communities of Practice: Defining Yavi-Chicha Sociotechnical Systems in the Río Grande de San Juan Basin (Border of Bolivia and Argentina) during the Period of Regional Developments (ca. AD 900-1450) (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite the Yavi-Chicha phenomenon being widely discussed in the Southern Andes, there is a lack of systematic research around the socioeconomic and political implications of production and circulation of the pottery of the Río Grande de San Juan Basin (Chicha Region). From the study of ceramic production and circulation, this...
From the Ashes: Volcanic Construction Materials in Pre-Columbian Ecuador (2018)
In many ways, volcanic eruptions define the pre-Columbian history of highland Ecuador: the shaping of the landscape, migration patterns, mythology, and ideology. Ecuador is one of the most volcanically active countries on earth, and it’s impossible to examine the archaeology without considering both the direct and indirect impacts of volcanic eruptions. Through millennia, the imposing presence of the volcanos on the northern Ecuadorian landscape inspired fear and veneration, with the...
From the Canopy to the Caye: Two of Britain's Colonial Ventures in Nineteenth-Century Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the nineteenth century, Latin America was a hotbed of trade and commerce driven principally by extractive industries such as agriculture and hardwood collection. Such ventures required large injections of capital into the creation and maintenance of productive landscapes as well as for hiring, housing,...
From the Dead to the Living: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Late Period Open Sepulchers, Upper Nepeña Drainage, Ancash, Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Ancestors: New Approaches to Andean "Open Sepulchers"" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ubiquity of open sepulcher type funerary contexts in the Andean highlands is a salient fact. Previous work and new surveys in the Pamparomás and Chaclancayo valleys of the Upper Nepeña Drainage have identified more than 60 such funerary contexts. Over the past two years, systematic excavations of selected sites coupled...
From the Early Holocene to Amazonian Forest Groves (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ecological studies in the Amazon increasingly report groves of economically useful tree species thought to be legacies of past human occupation and management practices, in contrast to an inherent composition with high species diversity and low species concentration. Brazil nut (Bertholletia excelsa – Lecythidaceae) trees occur in grove-type forest formations...
From the First to the Last Amazonian Dark Earths: The Longue-Durée of Landscape Management at the Teotônio Site, Upper Madeira River, SW Amazonia (2018)
The Teotônio site, situated on the right bank of the Madeira river near Porto Velho, Rondônia, is a key location for understanding the deep history of human-environment interactions and landscape management in southwest Amazonia. Its archaeological record stretches back to the early-mid Holocene and includes vestiges of 6,000-year old Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE) belonging to the Massangana Phase, hypothesised as marking the beginning of widespread landscape transformations in the Upper Madeira...
From the first to the last terras pretas: changes in cultural behaviour and terra preta formation in the Upper Madeira river, SW Amazonia (2017)
Terras pretas (TPs) are arguably the most visible and widespread artefacts of pre-Colonial occupations in Amazonia. Accumulated as the result of waste management practices by at least partly-sedentary populations, they are seen to mark the beginnings of landscape domestication and more agricultural-based societies starting ca. 3000 BP. On the bluffs of the Upper Madeira river, exceptionally early TP deposits were found dating more than 3000 years before TP sites in the rest of the basin. While...
From the Mountains to the Sea: A Deep-Time Perspective on the Heritage of Foods in Papua New Guinea (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) geography ranges from the high alpine mountains of its Highland provinces to remote oceanic islands and is home to a diverse spectrum of subsistence practices, most notably intensive tuber-focused horticulture, but also arboriculture and polycultures featuring many endemic...
From the Ocean to the Mountain: Marine Shell in the Patipampa Sector, Huari, Ayacucho, Peru (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Seeing Wari through the Lens of the Everyday: Results from the Patipampa Sector of Huari" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations in the residential area of Patipampa in the city of Huari revealed a striking amount of marine shell. While a large percentage of this shell assembly is spondylus, other marine shell, such as mussel, is also present. The assemblage includes worked shell objects, unworked fragments and...