Mountaintops of Chilla, El Oro (Ecuador)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The oral tradition of the Chilla landscape distinguishes two main stories: the first one portrays the apparition of the Virgin Mary, and the second one narrates the Mayan origins of its inhabitants. However, Chilla is in El Oro province, where a monumental pyramid and other neighboring sites correspond to the architectural footprints of ancient conquerors, such as the kañari, Inka, and Spanish, not the Maya. Today, the region of Chilla continues to effectively connect people from the Pacific coast with villages and towns of the southern Andes of Ecuador and Peru. Characterized by its location above the clouds, Chilla provided a strategic environment for building defensive features, shrines, and intermingled roads, which portray the meaningful legacy of the rise or fall of the Inka colonialism. This paper will analyze the political transformations of mountaintops taking into consideration seasonality, landslide hazard, mountain pass negotiation, and socioeconomic interests throughout time while focusing on the transitional Kañari-Inka period of prehispanic Ecuadorian history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36109.0