NORTHERN MANABI

Emilio Estrada (1957) first named the long Jama-Coaque cultural sequence spanning the Regional Development and Integration Periods in northern Manabi. While there is remarkable overall continuity in the ceramic assemblage, the research undertaken by Zeidler and colleagues in the Jama Valley and environs has been instrumental in introducing a sense of historical contingency into our understanding of the dynamics of social evolution. Zeidler (2003 and Chapter 24 in this volume) describes how large swathes of the western lowlands have been periodically smothered with varying depths of volcanic ash. The Jama-Coaque II occupation in the Jama Valley post-dates a tephra airfall around AD 400 that separates it from the earlier Jama-Coaque

Figure 26.1. Map of coastal Ecuador showing the principal late prehispanic cultures and sites.

I or Muchique 1 phase. This event may not have had such a devastating effect on human occupation as the ca. 355 BC Pululahua eruption because of the more extensive hill-slope farming strategies employed (Zeidler and Isaacson 2003). Based on a corpus of radiocarbon dates from stratigraphic contexts, Jama-Coaque II is now sub-divided into three phases of variable length, Muchique 2, 3 and 4, which range from AD 400 to 1532 (Zeidler 1990; Zeidler and Sutliff 1994). The vessel forms that mark the appearance of a new ceramic complex in Muchique 1 include flat-rimmed polypod bowls, pedestal bowls (compoteras) and wide-mouthed globular ollas; these continue into the succeeding phases with the addition of new applications of diagnostic red-band painting and finger-impressing (Zeidler and Sutliff 1994: 125-29). These new data apply primarily to the utilitarian components of the ceramic assemblages and underline the need for more information on the provenience, contexts and chronology of the elaborate ceramic figurine tradition for which Jama-Coaque culture is justly renowned.