Cochasqui: an Idealized Development Failure

The monumental site of Cochasqui (AD 500-1500) in the north Andean Ecuadorian highlands illustrates the manner in which development archaeological projects are productive in a myriad of ways. Far from achieving the initial success that the development agenda proposes, most projects achieve mixed results that tend to be most productive in ways that differ, even contradictorily so, to the aims initially expounded. In this manner, Cochasqui was far from able to successfully maintain its initial ideal of sustainable development yet has become one of the most visited archaeological sites in the country, and ultimately serves to sustain the historical ideal of the Ecuadorian nation-state far beyond its mere two centuries of existence.

The site is located 56 km north of Quito, Ecuador’s capital, only an hour-and-a-half’s drive north of the city. Since its initial opening to tourists in the late 1970s, under the auspices of the Programa Cochasqui, the site averages around 20 000 visitors a year - both nationals and foreigners. The Programa Cochasquii was initially defined as an organic structure that is concerned with scientific research; the conservation, restoration, the economic development of the region; the diffusion, promotion and carrying out of different agendas, scientific and ecological tourism; with the perspective of defining, motivating and defending our national identity.

Since 1986, the program has been officially an administrative unit of the Consejo Provincial, but until then the program had been an independent department of this state entity. The program’s funding is automatically included in the annual Consejo Provincial’s budget, although extra funds for special events are presented separately to the Consejo and directly approved by the Prefecto Provincial. The Cochasquii Program staff is typically composed of 15 members: a director, five tour guides (two of them from the local population), a site resident, an archaeologist, a sociologist, a secretary, two drivers, four local workers, and three local guards. By 1981 the 83.9 ha that currently make up the site had been completely expropriated from their last private owner, the Hacienda Pirela, and the site of Cochasquii opened its door to the public.

The program’s initial plan put forward four main objectives for the maintenance of the archaeological site of Cochasqui: (1) historical/anthropological; (2) conservation-restoration; (3) socioeconomic (community development); and (4) public awareness. These four initial objectives have been maintained during the program’s existence. The most interesting objective of the program in its central concern for the historical reconstruction of the site has been its interest in including the comuna (local community) in the site’s preservation. From the outset it proposed a dynamic concept of culture as the essential element for any possible model of autonomous development of the region.

The initial structure of the program was of an interdisciplinary nature because it looked to the development of Cochasqui not only as an archaeological site but also as an autochthonous community with many other needs, such as agricultural, socioeconomic, and medical. It also proposed a future structure wherein the local communities (comuna) would become responsible and capable of managing the archaeological site directly. This initial cultural objective was still prevalent among the tour guides at the site in the late 1990s.

In the program’s restructuring in the early 1990s, there was an explicit understanding of three major moments of activity at the site: the first was the initial period of cleaning and preparing the site for public display; the second was marked by the presence of foreign and national experts who served as consultants to the program and carried out studies of different aspects at the site; and the third was the program’s recognition of the difficulty in implementing many of the initial objectives, mainly due to the instability of the program’s personnel.

As a result of this, the program personnel has been completely overhauled many times over the last two decades, with only the local staff, the archaeologist and site resident remaining from the previous administrations. This instability of the staff’s personnel was signaled by Salcedo in his ethnography about cultural identity at Cochasqui as a central characteristic of the program. For him, the labor instability is provoked by a whole array of different reasons and situations:

The instability of the staff, who are constantly removed; the confusion of personal conflicts with the general and transpersonal objectives of the Program; the problems of communication between different social and cultural backgrounds; the intangible phenomena resulting from power conflicts; the labor tensions from the working conditions of the Provincial Council and of the Program itself; the different ideological tendencies of its members; and the different degrees of interest in the Program itself has made it a heterogeneous composition of varied interests and personal motivations, which is why a uniform collective action can not be implemented (Salcedo 1985:103).

More importantly, this instability is a response to actual structural constraints defined by the country’s different ideological currents. The program’s position within the Consejo Provincial, a state institution, makes it prey to economic hardships reflected in low wages, contract problems, transportation deficiency (cars always breaking down), and social instability as a result of the constant powerplay of consejeros and electoral politics.

In this manner, Cochasqui has failed at almost all of its development aims (not surprising to any degree for the multiple development projects around the world) but has been successful in other equally powerful enterprises. Perhaps its biggest succes is to have been able to muster an enormous sense of national pride and historical legitimization for the troubled Ecuadorian nation-state. Suffering from a profound loss of territory to its neighbors, particularly Peru, Ecuador has traditionally suffered from an identity void in terms of historical validation. The productive identification of these thousand-year-old monumental pyramids within the recent Ecuadorian nation-state has provided a sense of pride in an Indian past that had never coalesced in such successful fashion. It is not unrelated to this enterprise that the contemporary Indian communities in Ecuador (i. e, CONAIE-Confederation of Indian Nationalities of Ecuador) have been able to mobilize with unprecedented power in the last two decades. Although they yet have to make direct claims to archaeological remains and artifacts, there is no doubt that the global conditions of transnational ecological movements and local forms of claims to an ancestral past have powerfully served to revitalize an ancestral Indian identity in Ecuador.