Evaluating Ancient Volcanic Disaster in the Río Grande De Chone, Manabí, Ecuador
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| Veröffentlicht in: | ProQuest Dissertations and Theses (2025) |
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| Abstract: | Across the world, disasters are increasing in their frequency and in their intensity. This is due to a confluence of factors social (like modern development and population growth) and “natural” (such as the inputs of anthropogenic climate change). Social scientists in anthropology are pursuing the field of disaster anthropology to explore these shifting trends and investigate the human response to disasters today. Archaeologists, in turn, have focused instead on exploring disaster more concretely through identifying exposure to particular hazards, leaving deeper questions of the social character behind disaster processes relatively undertheorized.Archaeologists working in South America have been quite attuned to the presence of disasters in the past and their potential to impact social behavior, leaving them well-positioned to intercede in this discourse (Lanning 1967; Sandweiss and Quilter 2008). The signatures of volcanic hazards in particular afford archaeologists working in Ecuador to associate specific volcanic eruptions to ashfall (tephra) deposits which come from these volcanoes. Archaeologists can now point to the presence of several distinct volcanic eruptions which took place in the Holocene (Zeidler 2023). Some working in coastal Ecuador have argued that these eruptive moments are an entry point to further investigation of social dynamics, not a means to foreclose them (Zeidler and Isaacson 2003). Unfortunately, this advice has not always been heeded, and claims of catastrophe and total cultural collapse still pervade perceptions of volcanism in the pre-Columbian past. (Páez Barrera et al. 2024).Contributing to these and other discussions, the Proyecto Arqueológico Río Grande de Chone (PARGC) has worked in the largest tributary of the Río Chone, positioned in the heart of Manabí’s coastal cordillera. This study is driven by two motivations: first, to contribute to our collective understanding of the pre-Columbian societies and history of Manabí; and secondly, to understand how those societies reacted and lived among the occasional stochastic volcanic disaster that they experienced.From 2018 to 2023 the PARGC held fieldwork through regional survey and excavations at the sites of La Ñarusa and Platanales. Together these investigations demonstrate that Río Grande was occupied since at least the mid-3rd millennium BC. Settlements of the Late Valdivia and Chorrera cultural traditions provide new information regarding local and regional connections that these communities maintained with contemporaries living in the highlands and tropical Amazonia. In particular, the PARGC’s encounter with a small 2nd-millennium BC shrine, which had spiral architecture typical of the eastern tropical forest atop it, provides intriguing evidence of early religious architecture and interregional interaction. The PARGC also recovered numerous domestic surfaces and material culture relating to these societies as well as their descendants, the Jama-Coaque and Bahía cultures. Inter-cultural boundaries were once again crossed here, as both Jama-Coaque and Bahía material culture was encountered in contemporary contexts, evidence of vibrant borderland interactions (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995).Three material classes were analyzed in the wake of this fieldwork: ceramics, obsidian, and volcanic tephra. Ceramic traditions, investigated through modal and technological analyses, are argued to be long-lived and entrenched in the Río Grande de Chone by Late Valdivia at the latest (~2100 BCE). These traditions were iterated upon, and the technological improvements communally made by disparate artisan groups within their broader communities of practice eventually developed the impressively high-fired and well-manufactured ceramic technology attested by Chorrera ceramic art. Changes in highland sources utilized for obsidian demonstrate far-flung material exchange and vibrant sociopolitical relationships at several points in pre-Columbian times. The presence of volcanic tephra in archaeological contexts of the Río Grande de Chone finds stratigraphic utility as well as direct evidence for contending with volcanic disaster in these settlements.By addressing both of these lines of questioning, this thesis contributes to archaeologists’ understanding of Andean non-state societies over the longue-durée, within the inner coast of Ecuador, a critically understudied region. It not only seeks to provide the “boilerplate” understanding of cultures living in the region, but also attempts to reconstruct a social history of coastal Manabí amidst these disastrous conditions, which cause not only abandonments (as seen in previous investigations elsewhere in the region) but also new opportunities to forge solidarity across typical social boundaries. These interventions complement ecologically driven frameworks for investigating disaster in the past, providing key insights for how we can study past disaster in the future, as well as how we can survive and thrive amidst future disasters. |
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| ISBN: | 9798286438211 |
| Quelle: | Publicly Available Content Database |