Clouds for Water, Forest for Healing: Prehispanic Cultural Dynamics in the Cloud Forests of the Northern Andes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Tropical Montane Cloud Forests" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The cloud forests along the eastern and western foothills of the northern Andes have received little attention in the overall archaeology of South America. These regions of broken geography and dense forests have historically been considered culturally poor, with little impact on the sociocultural transformations of the Andean and coastal populations. However, numerous ongoing studies are shedding light on our understanding of the bubbling cultural interactions that took place in these areas. The continuous interaction with the populations of the highlands and lowlands, as well as a complex management of the forest and water sources, in some cases seem to have led to the emergence of large prehispanic settlements that transformed these landscapes and the ways of interacting with them. This paper aims to expand the discussion on the role of cloud forests as mediation spaces as well as cultural sources for the prehispanic populations of the Andean highlands and tropical lowlands of Ecuador.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• The Archaeology of Tropical Montane Cloud Forests

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37012.0