Internet Archaeology 10 Currie historical setting

2.1 Historical setting

In the centuries immediately preceding the conquest first by the Incas somewhere during the last years of the 15th and first years of the 16th century (the actual date is unknown), and then by Spain in 1534, the region between the Chota-Mira River to the north and the Guallabamba to the south (Figure 1b) was occupied by peoples formerly referred to as the Cara (Murra 1946; Meggers 1966, but also in Athens 1978; 1980 and 1992), designated to the Late Period as defined by Athens in the northern highlands chronological sequence, commencing c. AD 1250 (Athens 1978; 1980 and 1992, 202-03). The term Cara is, in fact, a misnomer, and probably includes at least four large polities who were allied in their resistance to the Inca advance: the Caranqui, Cayambe, Otavalo (probably originally known as Sarance) and Cochasquí, names which, in the case of the first three, persist in common usage now as the names of modern towns. Ethnohistorians Larrain Barros (1980, II:99-110) and Espinosa Soriano (1988, I:59-67) discuss the evidence for the names and locations of these different protohistoric ethnic groupings in detail (see also Athens 1992, 198 and Caillavet 1983 for other views). Espinosa suggests that the name Caranqui or 'Carangue' originally referred to a much larger region, the name of which was then changed to Otavalo - the name of a pre-eminent chief here - upon the establishment of encomiendas in this region by Benalcázar in 1535. The name Carangue then devolved to what is now the town of Caranqui itself (Espinosa Soriano 1988, II:21). Following the more accepted general usage initiated by Jijón y Caamaño in his definition of the 'Pais Caranqui' (Jijón y Caamaño 1952, the name Caranqui will be used here to describe the peoples occupying this region during the protohistorical period (e.g. Bray 1991, 23-25; 1992; 1995b, 138; Cordero 1998, 10).

The Late Period is most importantly associated with the construction of very large hemispherical or quadrilateral 'pyramid' tolas, sometimes having a ramp or a long 'walkway'. Twenty-two of these ramp-tola sites have been identified in the northern sierra provinces of northern Pichincha and Imbabura (Athens 1978; 1992; Gondard and López 1983; Knapp 1991). They are thought to be the location of the political centres of the region's paramount chiefs, as well as the foci for elaborate ceremonial and ritual for the scattered rural communities (Salomon 1986, 123, 126). Archaeological research at some of these sites, together with 'nearest-neighbour' studies, indicate that sites with ramp mounds are probably broadly contemporary with one another, in some cases originating from as early as the 8th and 9th centuries AD and possibly earlier, to the 10th and 11th centuries AD (Athens 1978, 122-39; 1980, 124-38; 1992, 205; Meyers 1975, 109). However, it is becoming clear that the phases of occupation associated with the creation of the very large mounds, particularly the quadrilateral ramp mounds, are actually somewhat later in date and apparently linked to socio-economic and political trends based upon agricultural intensification and resultant increased population densities which are taken to characterise the Late Period (Athens n.d.; Knapp 1984; 1991). For example, charcoal samples recently excavated from a midden deposit in the basal layers of the large quadrilateral Mound 3 at Otavalo have yielded radiocarbon dates of 665-564 cal. BP to 688-655 cal. BP or cal. AD 1285-1386 and cal. AD 1262-1295 (Athens 1998, 180, and n.d.). These dates are very close to the postulated inception of the Late Period and apparently post-date the eruption of Quilotoa volcano c. 800 BP, which approximately coincides with the commencement of the Late Period in the northern sierra (Mothes and Hall 1998a & b; Knapp and Mothes 1998). Ramp-mound sites existed at Cochasquí, Cayambe, Otavalo, Atuntaqui, Urcuqui, Socapamba and Pinsaquí to name but a few. The largest site of all these, however, was located on the property of present-day Hacienda Zuleta, where aerial photography has distinguished a total of 148 mounds in all, thirteen of them with ramps (Figure 2).