Salt-Making at Santa Catalinas de Salinas: Ecological Stress in the Northern Ecuadorian Highlands from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The residents of Santa Catalina de Salinas have exploited salt since prehispanic times in the northern Ecuadorian Andes, possibly in the hands of the indigenous groups of the Chota-Mira valley. However, during colonial times, this activity shifted to the hands of mestizos and Afro-descendant groups introduced in the area to perform economic activities sponsored by estates and plantations. Salt-making, as an assemblage of human and nonhuman agents, fluctuated with other economic activities that generated economic opportunities, social memory, and identity for the residents of this town. The fluctuation and shifting activities have produced ecological stress due to the different factors affecting the production of additional items. Throughout time, many aspects of the salt-making process have affected the production capacity and its immanent disappearance caused by ecological stress. In addition to this activity, introduced economic activities (promoted by sugar cane plantations during colonial times) have recovered hegemony in this area, aggravating the ecological stress. For this presentation, I will emphasize the contribution and roles of different agents to the environmental and landscape transformation of Santa Catalina de Salinas through time, emphasizing the question of how environments and other-than-human actors impact infrastructural projects and vice versa.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Unsettling Infrastructure: Theorizing Infrastructure and Bio-Political Ecologies in a More-Than-Human World   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37233.0