Horváth László – H. Bathó Edit – Kaposvári Gyöngyi – Tárnoki Judit – Vadász István szerk.: Tisicum - A Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok Megyei Múzeumok Évkönyve 13. (2003)

Archaeological Ramblings in Pre-Columbian Ecuador

LÁSZLÓ ZSOLNAY ARCHAEOLOGICAL RAMBLINGS IN PRE-COLUMBIAN ECUADOR In 1997 random luck drove me to Ecuador where I became aquatinted with Dr Stephen Rostáin, who was carrying out an excavation in the Upper Amazonian forests as the leader of a joint French-Ecuadorian project. With his help I spent altogether 4 months in Ecuador in 1997, 2000 and 2001. Most of these 4 months I spent working on the excavation near Macas along the River Upano, but I was also enabled to visit some other archaeological sites as well, e.g. Isla de la Palatat, a small island in the Pacific Ocean, and the Inca fortress of Ingapirca. Local archaeologists Ana Maritza Freire and Franklin Fuentes, helped me in my orientation in the different archaeological cultures of Ecuador. In my essay I attempt to expound the main Ecuadorian archaeological cultures in chronological order. America and Australia are the two continents that became populated latest on our planet. The conquerors of America arrived from Asia most probably across what is the Berring Strait today. There are several not properly confirmed theories covering the details of this traverse. According to the most accepted view people simply walked across the strait when the water level fell of as a result of the Ice Age. This phenomenon has occurred several times during the past two million years, because of the glaciation of the Pleistocene period, a huge amount of water was accumulated as integrated ice fields over vast northern areas of Europe, Asia and America. According to the latest evidence found in East Brazil in some rocky shelters, people have been living in America for approximately 30,000 years. In the localisation of this evidence Mihály Bányai played an important role, a Hungarian archaeologist living in Lagoa Santa, Brazil, whom I have had the honour to meet and discuss his findings on several occasions. The area was drier and hotter when the first settlers arrived. Apart from a few dense forests, the Amazon was most probably covered with temperate zone woodland, which helped the spread of people. The area of Ecuador, which can be divided into three geographical regions, was populated much later. The mountain ranges of the Andes, the austere conditions of the highland (Sierra) made life difficult on the cold plateau. The savanna of the Pacific Coast (Costa) was ruled by harsh conditions. The lowland of the east (Selva, Oriente) was (and still is) covered with equatorial forests. According to the present evidence of studies the first settlers arrived in Ecuador approximately 11-12,000 years ago. Scientists in Ecuador divide the era before the Spanish conquest into five phases: paleo Indian age (10,000 - 4,600 B.C.), the age of morphosis (4,000 - 300 B.C.), the age of regional development (300 B.C. - 600 A.D.), the age of integration (600 -1,480) and the age of the Inca (1480-1532). 94