coast, and George Dorsey collected some Inca artifacts from La Plata Island, 36 kilometers southwest of Manta in Manabí Province, for the Field Columbian Museum during the Fourth Centennial Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Jijón y Caamaño was later instrumental in bringing the German archaeologist Max Uhle to Ecuador, and he financed Uhle’s research for nearly two decades (from 1920 to 1939). Beginning in the 1940s coastal archaeological research started to dominate Ecuadorean culture history. This trend needs to be explained for an understanding of the development of archaeological research in the hub of the northern Andean area.

Although small in size, Ecuador presents a great variety of environments and landforms. The upthrust of the Andes divided it into two lowland regions. The coast, west of the Andes, is separated into a Tertiary uplifted plain, bordered by the Pacific Ocean and ancient volcanic mountains. Between these mountains and the Andes, two large riverine basins began to fill with alluvium around 10,000 b.p., providing a western counterpart to the Amazonian jungle. A mantle of recent alluvium covers the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon, and in some areas it overlays ancient alluvial deposits, laid down before the Andean upthrust. The Ecuadorean Andes are divided into two intermontane valleys by the Cordillera Real. Its western valley reaches altitudes higher that 2,000 meters; the eastern valley averages 900 meters in altitude. The western valley is subdivided into smaller valleys that drain both eastward into the Upper Amazon and westward into the coastal lain and the Pacific Ocean.

Beginning in the Holocene the landscape of Ecuador marked by the Andean and coastal uplifts of the Tertiary period underwent great changes. Rapid deposits of recent alluvium modified the landscape of the Guayas and Amazonian basins. Deposits of lava and volcanic tuft caused by the intense volcanic activity in the northern Ecuadorean Andes also changed the early-Holocene landscape. And during the end of the Pleistocene and the beginning of the Holocene, severe climatic and sea-level shifts dramatically altered the landscape as well. Tropical savannahs changed into forests, and the coastline retreated as it gave way to the rising seas. The great mammals of the Pleistocene, which had lived in the area for nearly a million years, disappeared. These changes occurred 2,000 to 3,000 years after the arrival of the Paleo-Indians.

Active floodplain covers great spaces of the Ecuadorean lowlands, and alluvium is added to the Upper Amazon and to the Guayas basin each year. Meandering rivers churn up the alluvium, redepositing it and its cultural contents in newly created point-bar formations, complicating the stratified deposits in new landforms. The accumulated deposits cover the evidence for early occupation of these bottomlands. An example is the Valdivia II site at Colimes de Balzar (with two C-14 assays of 4770 + 210 b.p. or 3200 b.c. [corrected]). This site, buried under 8.20 meters of alluvium strata, shows interspacing by volcanic-ash deposits and habitation floors from several occupational periods. Late-Pleistocene remnants, dating between 18,000 and 10,000 b.c., should be much deeper.

In the northern Ecuadorean highlands, under a soft volcanic tuft about 3 meters deep, Pleistocene faunal remains can be found. A good example is the Paramo del Angel, north of the Chota Valley in Carchi Province, where the remains of several mastodons have been discovered at the bottom of erosion gullies. In the eastern lowlands, Pedro T. Porras found some chipped stone artifacts at Yasuní, apparently belonging to that period, but he did not report faunal associations of any kind. This lack of conclusive evidence is probably the result of unsystematic investigations in preceramic archaeology.

Some 10,000 years of archaeological evidence is buried in this stage. Grave robbers, antiquarians, and some archaeologists have unearthed shards that testify to a complex social-history process based on the exploitation of a landscape rich in ecological niches that supported some of the most diverse floras and faunas in the world.

The Evolution of Archaeology in Ecuador

In trying to systematize the progression of archaeological research in Ecuador, one may be tempted to use Willey and Phillips’s classification