Ecuador

Pottery in the New World appeared first in the equatorial and subequatorial tropics. It developed next in the subtropics and, finally, in the temperate zones a few centuries before European contact. Archaeological teaching and research developed inversely. The subject was first taught north of the Tropic of Cancer in the United States, then south of the tropic of Capricorn in argentina and chile and, finally, in Ecuador. References to the pre-Columbian past began with reports by the early Spanish chroniclers who accompanied Francisco Pizarro on his voyages from panama to peru. This period of Ecuadorean archaeology, which was mainly ethnohistorical, lasted until the last two decades of the nineteenth century—roughly the same as that in any other area of the New World, corresponding to the speculative period defined by gordon willey and Phillip Phillips for U.S. archaeology.

In the late nineteenth century, Msgr. Federico González Suárez, the archbishop of Quito and a historian, wrote, as an appendix to his History of Ecuador, a volume entitled Archaeological Atlas. A professor of history at Quito University, he was the first of a generation of historians interested in the aboriginal history of his country. Others, including Carlos Manuel Larrea and Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, also left their imprint on the archaeology of Ecuador. They conducted research in the Andean intermontane valleys and on the coast of Manabí and Esmeraldas Provinces. However, no serious effort was made to develop professional archaeologists in Ecuador until the 1980s.

During the nineteenth century European naturalists and geographers who visited the New World—such as William Bollaert (from 1860 to 1880), Anatole Bamps (from 1878 to 1888), and Alfons Steuble (from 1875 to 1888)—made the first collections of archaeological artifacts in Ecuador. (The latter’s collections were studied by a young max uhle in Dresden from 1889 to 1890 and in 1892.) In the 1890s Marshall Saville from the George Heye Foundation carried out extensive excavations along the Ecuadorean