Prologue

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the 1987 Bennington Conference on Lowland South America, an event that Ken Kensinger has been hosting for a number of years. Don Lathrap was not attending the conference, so I sent him a copy of the paper. A few weeks later, Don mailed the manuscript back, his only comment scrawled across the title page: “I hope you get to Pueblo Viejo, for I have been there.” I never found out what Don meant by this comment. As far as I know, he was never physically present in the Santiago-Cayapas region of northern Esmeraldas Province (Ecuador), much less at Pueblo Viejo, the legendary home of the Chachi. Perhaps Don's message was just one of those simultaneously reprimanding and encouraging prods. Or perhaps Don was speaking in a shamanic voice: “I have taken flight-medicine to Pueblo Viejo.” Maybe it was just some lingering fight with Berkeley where, contra Roosevelt (1989: 58), I completed my graduate training. Who knows?

Anyway, Don, I'm still trying to get to Pueblo Viejo. The following paper falls under the rubric of “ethnohistory,” one of those hybrid terms in which anthropology asserts a cross-disciplinary status. A main issue is the origin of the 3,000 or so Chachi who currently occupy the tropical forest lowlands centering on the Cayapas Basin of the Esmeraldas coast.