Late Pre-Hispanic Chiefdoms of Highland Ecuador

The natural beauty, temperate climate, and general productivity of the intermontane basins of highland Ecuador have attracted human occupation for millennia. Narrow in comparison to other sectors of the Andes, the equatorial highlands are defined by two parallel ranges known as the Cordillera Occidental and the Cordillera Oriental, each studded with an impressive array of snow-capped peaks. The intercordilleran zone between them, sometimes referred to as the “avenue of the volcanos,” is divided into 15 intermontane basins by a series of low, transverse ridges called “nudos.” During the late pre-Hispanic period, beginning around AD 800, the populations of several basins coalesced and began to develop collective identities and more complex forms of sociopolitical organization.

Within a cultural evolutionary framework, these new formations would be classed as chiefdoms, though they offer something of a challenge to our conventional models of chiefdom-level polities as well as to the framework itself. While the archaeological data from the Ecuadorian highlands are relatively sparse, when used in conjunction with the ethnohistoric information, it is possible to gain some insight into the trajectories, organization, and operation of the late pre-Incaic societies of this region. The picture that emerges contributes to our understanding of the range of variability encompassed under the rubric of “chiefdom” and ideas about the mechanisms that underpin these formations. The political configuration of the equatorial Andes may be viewed as one of a growing number of cases that point to alternative ways of conceiving and modeling social complexity beyond vertical integration and hierarchical order (e.g., White 1995; McIntosh 1999).