The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Barbacoan World: Recognizing and Preserving the Unique Indigenous Cultural Developments of the Northern Andes" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Barbacoan populations resided throughout Ecuador and southwestern Colombia during the Spanish conquest of the northern Andes. The Barbacoan World was a cultural matrix of comparable mortuary traditions (shaft tombs and burial mounds), monumental platform mounds, land-use strategies, statuary corpuses, rock art, ceramic forms, iconography, and more. There were extensive market economies with interregional exchange systems that connected the highlands, Pacific coast, and Upper Amazon. These societies demonstrated various adaptive responses to a period of increased volcanic activity emblematically characterized by the eruption of the Quilotoa volcano around AD 1280, which covered much of Ecuador in ashfall, marked the climatic transition from the Medieval Climate Anomaly to the Little Ice Age, and arguably led to several ethnogeneses through social reorganization. Several Barbacoan societies were colonized during the Inka Empire’s northern expansion, but many of their cultural practices and languages survived into early Spanish colonialism, after which some highland Barbacoan languages were gradually replaced by Quechua. Today, only several societies still speak Barbacoan languages and maintain their respective traditions: the Chachi, Tsáchila, Áwa Pit/Kwaiker, Misak, and Totoró. The aim of this session is to recognize and preserve the unique cultural articulations and histories of Barbacoan societies, their neighbors, and their predecessors.