Culture at an Andean Crossroads: New Analysis of Chorrera Ceramics from the Jama River Valley, Manabi, Ecuador

Summary

The archaeology of Late Formative Ecuador (ca. 2800-2000 BCE) remains only partially explored and understood, especially when compared to studies of contemporary cultures in the Andes of Peru and Bolivia. However, ceramics looted from these contexts suggest a vibrant and complex array of cultures in this region. Excavations in the Jama River Valley of northern Manabí, performed in the early 1990s but largely unpublished, explored multiple sites pertaining to the Chorrera style, one of Ecuador’s most stunning and poorly understood cultures.

This paper synthesizes results of recent modal ceramic analysis of the materials recovered from these excavations, with the intent of comparing results from northern Manabí to prior modal analyses of Chorrera ceramics from the Guayas region. This research will motivate future study in the Jama River Valley, as it begins a renewed effort to understand the nature of Chorrera’s cultural hegemony and its connections to coastal Colombian and Peruvian contemporaries. Bringing more archaeological contexts into discussions of Late Formative Ecuador also serves to better inform and unite the narrative of Ecuadorian museum collections with the region’s archaeological studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage