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began a few months later, followed, in a smaller way, this new trend.
Formally trained Ecuadorean archaeologists working in European and U.S. universities returned to Ecuador at the end of this period. Their impact would soon be felt in the progress of archaeology in their homeland. Examples of the research they started include the project known as Sacred Isles of Ecuador, during which the existence of long-distance maritime trade networks centered on the coast of Ecuador was discovered, and the excavation of the obsidian mine at Mullumica by Ernesto Salazar.
As archaeology progressed, pothunting and looting accelerated due to the increase in international demand and the market pressure created by the acquisition of looted archaeological art by local museums and collectors. The consequent loss of artifacts and sites through disturbance placed the heritage of Ecuador under great pressure.
In 1980 the first formal program to graduate professional archaeologists opened at the Escuela Superior Politecnica del Litoral (ESPOL) in Guayaquil. Although the creation of the Institute of National Heritage (Instituto de Patrimonio Cultural) in 1979 had formalized archaeological research, achieving a national consensus on the importance of archaeology for Ecuador is still a pending assignment.
Historically, most Ecuadoreans, including some university and government officials, did not consider archaeology a scientific effort. It was regarded as an activity worthy of dilettantes, the rich, and a few dreamers. The professional archaeologist was seen as strange sort whose career was considered a hobby by most people of means and a job by the poor farmers who became looters as a means of offsetting the chronic scarcity of agricultural jobs.
Such conceptions are now changing. For a long time, however, there was strife between museum directors and museum research personnel. The former felt that archaeologists pulled only potsherds out of the ground, not the beautiful pieces brought to them by grave robbers. The latter wanted museum funds to be used for archaeological investigations, not the acquisition of archaeological art.
During the 1980s and early 1990s professional archaeologists, on the one hand, and museum directors and collectors, on the other, waged a war that was partially won by the archaeologists, for the national museums in Ecuador halted all forms of acquisition. However, the huge acquisition budgets were not redirected to research, and research funds continued to be meager. The difficulty lay in the fact that archaeology was and still is considered by the cultural elite to be a business for antiquarians and art merchants, rather than a career worthy of historians or anthropologists. Private and archaeological museum collections, including those of the national museums, have been acquired by purchasing from looters rather than through museum-financed archaeological research. Museum directors and collectors justify their actions by saying that they are keeping the archaeological pieces from leaving the country. However, a study made by archaeologists and economists for the Central Bank of Ecuador showed that the internal demand for archaeological art actually finances the looting that yields the small amount of excellent art that is exported clandestinely.
Archaeological research nevertheless grew over this period, thanks to international funding and to some national research funds provided by groups such as Foncultura, or the Social and Cultural Fund of the National Petroleum Company. Studies of the impact of development on archeaological sites were also started, with much of this research carried out by Ecuadorean graduates in archaeology.
During the last decade of the twentieth century, there was an increase in the number of Ecuadorean archaeologists working in their field, in spite of the economic crisis that affected most cultural and social programs in
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