The Missing Link

The Peninsula is, to date, the oldest known inhabited site on the coast of Ecuador.

The oldest sites described were those of Professor Lanning of Columbia University, Manantial, Exacto and Las Vegas, a-ceramic (that is, they did not yet incorporate the elaboration of clay objects into their skills). This last place, Las Vegas, has a site museum in the town of Santa Elena, known as "The Lovers of Sumpa", an imaginative name for the position of two skeletons lying embraced. (It is also one of the cemeteries proper in America). Surrounded by stone tools, sharp-edged Horsteno, hammer-like boulders, and a large number of vestiges of their food: black shell, (Anadara tuberculosa), "mule's foot",(Anadara grandis) and other mollusks, vivals and gastropods, which is called a "shell midden".

Then, the great “cultural explosion”, as I call it: pottery is born! The revolutionary thing is not the manufacture of utensils in themselves, but the impact on the diet, (!) I explain: you have to imagine the primary way of feeding, raw meat and fish, or roasted over direct fire, ground grains and mixed raw with water, but the invention of the pot, brings with it a new and efficient way of cooking, children begin to live longer, because their feeding is easier, you can make something like the Mexican “atole”, “papillas” are born, and soups, and the use of vegetables is expanded, in short, it is possible to infer that “progress” that translated into demographic increase

There were more and better fed children, the slow cultural process of Formative began, then that of Regional Development and that of Integration.

Because of that invention of ceramics, which was first defined and described by Emilio Estrada, with his extraordinary field chief Prof. Julio Viteri, nearly 40 years ago, the first on-site museum in Ecuador was designed and built in Valdivia, Santa Elena Province, in the original excavation, reopened for the symposium “Andean-Mesoamerican Anthropological Correlations” held in Salinas in 1971, that modest museum helped to define or clarify concepts: yes, there are architectural vestiges in the country, Ingapirca, Paredones, the Pucarás -fortresses-, on the summits of the inter-Andean alley, (most built to contain the Inca invasion) and of course the magnificent Pyramids of Cochasquí, on the heights of Guayabamba, but most of the Ecuadorian Archaeological Heritage is not ABOVE the ground, but UNDER it…

That is why the approach of this Museum: "The Window to the Past", was to do it in that excavation mentioned; with a perimeter rainwater channel, a light Cade roof and a wooden staircase, allowed the visitor to "peek" into the past, observing NATURAL and ARTIFICIAL strata - caused by man - there were going to be display boxes made of concrete and glass, embedded in the "walls" of the excavation, with cultural and ergological objects (figurines, vases and artifacts) corresponding to the STRATUM that their past makers had inhabited, it began, from bottom to top, that particular site, with fragments of "San Pedro" ceramics ("uncomfortable" vestige BEFORE Valdivia, found by Henning Bishoff and don Julio Viteri, right there), -which for me, is the "missing link" between Las Vegas and Valdivia- and successively the three original Valdivian phases, later increased to 9 phases (!) by Betsy Hill, immediately above them, Machalilla, above This, Engorroy (coastal phase of Chorrera), then splendid vestiges of Guangala, whose traces are very abundant throughout the area, and "at the end", Huancavilcas and scarce Spanish vestiges, (like a blown glass bottleneck, on the surface).

It should be noted that the OVERLAPPING of cultures in the same place has nothing magical or special about it, what happens is that our ancestors were eminently logical and used the most suitable lands to live…