INTRODUCTION

The formal definition of the Formative Period in the New World began with the seminal work of Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips (1958) in their attempt to devise a historical-developmental periodization scheme for pan-hemispherical application. As Jorge Marcos has noted, this concept was largely “identical to what Gordon Childe had called the Early Neolithic” of the Old World (Marcos 2003:7), with connotations of agricultural production and sedentary village life. James A. Ford (1969) carried out the first detailed treatment of the concept for the Americas; he posed a unitary model of Formative development from maritime diffusion, which he pitted against an alternative explanation based upon the “psychic unity of man”. As Ford (1969: 9) defines it, the Formative Period consists of “the 3000 years (or less in some regions) during which the elements of ceramics, ground stone tools, handmade figurines, and manioc and maize agriculture were being diffused and welded into the socioeconomic life of the people living in the region extending from Peru to the eastern United States”. Such unitary diffusionist models were posited as early as 1917 by Herbert Spinden (1917, 1928), but were not systematically explored or championed until the work of Ford (1969) and, in more recent decades, various writings of the late Donald W. Lathrap (see, for example, Lathrap 1974, 1977, 1985, 1987; Lathrap et al. 1975), among others.

More recent archaeological research throughout the New World, however, has demonstrated that the Formative was neither a product of diffusion from a single source, as Ford would have it, nor was it a product of psychic unity. Rather, it should more properly be thought of as a complex series of independent, or at least semi-autonomous, hearths of innovation derived from Archaic antecedents in which sedentism, reliance on maize and/or manioc agricultural production, ceramics, polished stone tools, and handmade figurines, all came together as a comparable constellation of traits, but at vastly different rates and in different combinations at key sites throughout the New World (Clark and Knoll 2005). No simple unitary model of Formative development is now tenable, and the

Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell.

Springer, New York, 2008

New World Formative is currently viewed as anything but simple, whether one considers the origins of ceramic production (Hoopes 1994; Raymond, Oyuela, and Carmichael 1994; cf. Meggers 1997), the origins of agriculture (Clark and Knoll 2005; Perry et al. 2007; Piperno and Pearsall 1998), or the origins of sedentary village life and first towns in the Americas (Clark, Gibson, and Zeidler n. d.). Attention is instead focused on discrete environmental contexts and on specific historical processes of development within each of the independent hearth areas, while keeping in mind potential evidence of contact and exchange relations between them.

Ecuador in the Formative Period represents one of these independent hearth areas in New World prehistory, one where sedentary village life, ceramic production, maize/manioc agriculture, polished stone tool production, and figurine ideology came together at a fairly early time range. Even within the northern Andean region, however, both the origins and eventual development of Formative Period cultures were uneven phenomena at best, and as we shall see, the coast seems to have outpaced the highlands and eastern lowlands in terms of population densities and social complexity. Space limitations preclude a detailed treatment, but interested readers are urged to consult recent summaries of Formative Period archaeology such as Raymond and Burger (2003) and Idrovo Uriguen (1992) for the entire country, Staller (2001) for the coastal region, and the five Ecuadorian contributions in Ledergerber-Crespo (1999) for selected regions of the country. Even as these recent works provide up-to-date summaries of archaeological knowledge, new discoveries are constantly coming to light, both from scientific archaeological research and, unfortunately, from commercial looting and antiquities trafficking.

For a recent summary of absolute dating and cultural chronology for the Ecuadorian Formative, the reader is referred to the four appendices in Raymond and Burger (2003a), which respectively cover the coast and western lowlands (Zeidler 2003), the northern highlands (Lippi 2003), the eastern lowlands (Rostoker 2003), and the southern highlands (Raymond 2003b). Since the coastal lowlands have received a greater amount of archaeological study, the cultural sequence established there provides a useful referent for discussion of Formative Period occupations elsewhere in the country. The general cultural chronology for this area is summarized in Table 24.1, based on the compilation of radiocarbon determinations in Zeidler (2003).

This chapter begins with a summary of the Formative Period cultures known for the coast and western lowlands: the Valdivia, Machalilla, and Chorrera cultures. Following that, I consider the Formative Period manifestations in the northern, central, and southern highlands, and the eastern lowlands or oriente. Figure 24.1 shows the locations of the various archaeological areas and sites discussed in the text.

Table 24.1. Formative Period Chronology for the Western Ecuadorian Lowlands.

Sub-Period Early Formative Middle Formative Late Formative

Cultural Manifestation Valdivia Machalilla Chorrera

Range B. C. 4400-1450 cal B. C. 1430-830 cal B. C. 1300-300 cal B. C.

Figure 24.1. Map of Ecuador showing locations of sites mentioned in the text. (James Zeidler)