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Quijos Settlement Dataset |
The archaeological information for Ecuador has been organized according to a scheme popularized by Meggers and Evans since the 50’s: Pre-ceramic, Formative, Regional Development and Integration periods. Subsequent researchers have applied this scheme to virtually all regions of Ecuador, from the coast to the highlands, to the Amazon. The association of local ceramic chronologies to these major periods, which represent spans of time that are commonly thought of as a set of distinctive traits of social, political, and economic organization, has been done in a rather automatic fashion, privileging correspondence of absolute dates instead of correspondence of actual socio-political change. Typically, when dates associated with certain ceramic types fall within the span of time believed to correspond to, say, the Integration Period, then it is assumed that the society in question at that time should have been a typical “Integration Period society.” The characterization of such periods and their transitions suggests a unilineal and uniform path of social change. The Formative Period (1000 to 300 B.C.) is characterized by sedentary communities but without signs of permanent authority or political centralization. The period of Regional Development (300 B.C. to 800 A.D.) is supposedly characterized by the development of regional political centers and growth and settlement expansion. The Integration Period (800-1500 A.D.) is seen as the one in which regional centers consolidate (Almeida 2000). These characterizations not always have solid empirical bases, and lead to unilineal and hyper-coherent assumptions about social and political change, in which the attributes of certain societal types are believed to change in unison. In this scheme, when there is evidence of a large system of raised fields, for example, it is not uncommon that the society that constructed them is said to have had regional political centers and a coercive system of authority. For the case of the Quijos region in particular, it has been assumed that the social and political configuration of pre-Hispanic societies corresponds to the traits of the Regional Development and Integration periods, based on the dates available for the region (Arellano 1989).
Porras (1975) made the first attempt to establish a ceramic chronology for the Quijos region based on sherds collected during his work in the 50’s and 60’s. He proposed that only one major block of time could be distinguished, one in which Cosanga pottery was predominant, and that despite the existence of other ceramic types whose frequencies varied through the stratigraphic sequences, none of them had ever been dominant types so as to represent a different phase. The observation that led him to this conclusion is that Cosanga sherds appeared in all but one of the levels in the 16 stratigraphic tests he excavated. Porras paid attention to the changing frequencies of the ceramic types he defined (Papallacta Ordinario, Cosanga Ordinario and Borja Ordinario in chronological order from early to late, plus 13 types of decorated Cosanga sub-types) as they related to the stratigraphy. He identified some trends (that the size of the temper particles tended to diminish through time, that certain decorations were common at the lower or upper ends of the stratigraphic sequences), but concluded that because the quantities of Cosanga pottery were so overwhelming in comparison to the other types and did not give way to other types to stand by themselves in the stratigraphic sequences, the use of this ceramic type must have been common from the beginning of ceramic occupation in the region. He assumed that Cosanga must have coexisted with the other types, otherwise Papallacta Ordinario and Borja Ordinario should have occurred alone in at least some strata.
The 11 carbon dates provided by Porras range from 665 B.C. to 1810 A.D. (a date of 1495 B.C seems too early and therefore is not considered here, and another date is modern). All of these dates came from strata in which Cosanga pottery was present and predominant, explaining why he took the whole range of dates to define the Cosanga Phase (I discuss these and other dates in the other sections of this electronic document), yet he averaged them in a way that produced a range between 400 B.C. and 700 A.D. as the span of time of the Cosanga Phase. Specifically, he called this phase Cosanga-Píllaro I and II for the eastern Andes (Quijos Valley), and Cosanga-Píllaro III and IV to the span of time during which Cosanga pottery was present in several locations throughout the northern and central Ecuadorean Andes (700 to 1500 A.D.), but supposedly no longer found in the Quijos Valley. This fit nicely with his assertion that the Quijos had been expelled from their territory by hunter-gatherer groups from the Amazon and forced to migrate to the central and northern sierra.
The association of a number of late dates with Cosanga pottery in the northern highlands constituted for some researchers solid proof of Porras’ hypothesis regarding the expulsion of the inhabitants of the Quijos region (e.g. Athens 1995). This has been based on a reading of Porras that overlooks the fact that he averaged the radiocarbon dates, as some other researches have already noted (Lumbreras 1990). Regardless, at least since the 70´s, recurring discussion of the archaeology of the Quijos region of Ecuador, has centered for the most part on the origins of Cosanga pottery found in the highlands, the reasons why it is present there, whether it was locally manufactured or imported from the Quijos region, and revisions of Porras’ work and conclusions (Arellano 1989; Bray 1995; Buys 1995; Lumbreras 1990; Oberem 1981). This discussion, now known as “the Panzaleo puzzle” (Bray 1995) after the name Jijón y Caamaño gave this pottery in 1952, continues to be a hot issue of debate (see Ontaneda 2002). Apart from Panzaleo, Cosanga, and Cosanga-Píllaro, this ceramic type also appears in the literature as Cerámica Fina or Cerámica Delgada. For the sake of avoiding confusion I will refer to it here as Cosanga. This type of ceramics has appeared frequently in the northern highlands in burials and mounded sites, which has been interpreted as evidence that Cosanga pottery outside the Quijos region was mainly an elite prerogative and had ceremonial usages (Bray 1995). The forms, mainly decorated bowls with pedestals known in the literature as compoteras, and large round jars with anthropomorphic decoration, are indistinguishable from the ones found in the Valle de Quijos, and the results of mineralogical analysis (Arellano 1989; Bray 1995; De Paepe and Buys 1990) agree that the specimens found in the highlands must have been brought from the eastern Andes. Despite intensive study of the distribution of this ceramic type outside of its region of origin, the gaps that Porras´ work in the region does not fill have not been re-addressed by other scholars through the collection of new data. Complaints about the inadequacy of his work are very common, but the tendency has been to use the same set of data that most scholars consider inadequate. Revisions based on re-analyzing his materials are complicated by the fact that a good portion of this ceramic collection is in Washington or else dispersed throughout several museums and monasteries. In the other sections I re-address Porras´ work with the use of new local data, and establish a ceramic typology that helps to identify temporal differences among types, and therefore reconstruct a trajectory of occupation in the region through the analysis of settlement patterns.
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