Prehispanic Chronology of Settlements in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeological research in the Amazonian region provides detailed data on sites classified as villages, hamlets, and temporary or seasonal dwellings, with a wide cultural and chronological diversity. Pre-Hispanic settlements, both nucleated and village-type, consisted of houses built on earth mounds and connected by plazas, roads, raised fields, and geoglyphs. On the contrary, scattered hamlets were found on terraces carved into slopes on the edges of alluvial valleys. There is also evidence of walled constructions or houses with stone foundations, interpreted as possible advances of Colonial and more recent interactions by people from the Andean highlands. However, these interpretations need to be supported by radiocarbon dates. For this reason, this work aims to compile a bank of absolute dates to produce a chronological synthesis of the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon using OxCal (Bronk Ramsey, 2009). Specific goals include tracing older regional patterns of human settlement, inferring possible migratory routes, and examining the direction of mobility of past populations through time. Although the study focuses on providing information at a regional scale, particular emphasis will be placed on two case studies: the village of Te Zulay in Pastaza, and the hamlets of the Quimi Valley in Zamora-Chinchipe.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52789