Recent Innovations in Ecuadorian Archaeology

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Recent Innovations in Ecuadorian Archaeology" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The archaeology of the Northern Andes was originally defined by grand schemes and theories. Beginning with the work of Jijón y Caamaño and Uhle and continuing up to Meggers, Evans, and Estrada, archaeologists focused on extra-regional influences on cultural origins and ceramic typologies. In more recent years, and especially with the onset of cultural resource management in Ecuador, new approaches have led to innovative results with perspectives that differ from earlier approaches. Our understanding of the societies that lived in the Northern Andes is explored in order to establish a greater knowledge of prehistoric Ecuador that includes community development, ideology, economy, and the chronology of culture change. This symposium brings together some of the recent advances in Northern Andean archaeology.