Cochasquí

Cochasquí, an important archaeological site in Ecuador located approximately 30 miles north of the capital city of Quito in Pichincha province. Excavated in the mid-1960s by a team of German archaeologists, Cochasquí remains the best studied of a class of sites found in the equatorial Andes comprising earthen mounds, or tolas as they are locally known. The distribution of these mound sites is coterminous with the territory of the ethnic group known as the Caranqui, who occupied the northern Ecuadorian highlands at the time of the Spanish invasion. Mound sites in this region date to the late prehistoric period, approximately 1000 to 1500 ce, and represent pre-Columbian centers of political power. Ethnohistoric accounts of the Inca invasion of the Caranqui region suggest that Cochasquí was an important center of local resistance.

The number of tolas per site varies greatly, ranging from a few to well over one hundred. At Cochasquí, there may have originally been forty-five mounds, though less than two-thirds of that number still remain. Two basic types of mounds are found at Cochasquí and elsewhere in the region: the round, hemispherically shaped variety and the truncated pyramidal forms, which may or may not have associated ramps. The former range from 20 to 132 feet in diameter and represent both mortuary features and house sites. The largest of the truncated pyramidal mounds at Cochasquí is 264 by 297 feet at the base and 66 feet tall. These quadrilateral mounds are generally thought to have served as house platforms for elite residences and are also often assigned a ceremonial function. The hemispherical habitation mounds tend to predate the quadrilateral mounds, with the construction of the latter thought to signal fundamental changes in the level of sociopolitical organization.

See alsoAndes; Archaeology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The primary reference works are those of the German archaeologists who directed excavations: Udo Oberem, Cochasquí: Estudios arqueológicos (1981), and Udo Oberem and Wolfgang Wurster, Excavaciones en Cochasquí, Ecuador, 1964–1965 (1989). Luis Lumbreras, Cronología arqueológica de Cochasquí (1990), offers a critical evaluation of the work conducted at Cochasquí and considers the site in its regional context. For a more general study of mound sites in the northern highlands, see J. Stephen Athens, "Ethnicity and Adaptation: The Late Period-Cara Occupation in Northern Highland Equador," in Resources, Power, and Interregional Interaction, edited by Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban (1992), pp. 193-219.

Additional Bibliography

Bray, Tamara L. "The Panzaleo Puzzle: Non-Local Pottery in Northern Highland Ecuador." Journal of Field Archaeology 22, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 137-156.

Lippi, Ronald D. Una exploración arqueológica del Pichincha Occidental, Ecuador. Quito: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador: Museo Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, 1998.

Pullas De la Cruz, Virgilio. Historia hecha en Cangahua: Guia del centro monumental arqueologico y vida socio-cultural de Cochasqui. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1997.

                                              Tamara L. Bray