Costume and History in Highland Ecuador

Notes

Chapter 1 1. See Salomon 1986, chap. 1, for a more extensive and referenced discussion of geographic factors in Ecuador’s culture. 2. Tumbaga is an alloy of gold, copper, and whatever trace elements are to be found in the gold, generally a bit of silver. This alloy has a lower melting temperature than either pure copper or pure gold and has approximately the same hardness as tin or arsenic bronze. Generally, tumbaga was used to make ornaments that were destined to be depletion gilded, although the red gold color was apparently much admired in parts of Colombia. Tumbaga was hard enough to be used for tools in areas in which copper was relatively rarer than gold. 3. Many of the ancient holy sites (huacas) have simply had a statue of the Virgin Mary or the Sacred Heart of Jesus placed on or near them. Ancient huacas in use today include springs, waterfalls, irrigation system heads, places where landslides are common , large rock outcrops or boulders standing on their own, and various mountains or hills with striking shapes or other unusual features. 4. Guaman Poma was illustrating Inca life for Europeans in the European tradition of showing ordinary, as well as socially or religiously important, people going about their daily tasks. Like the earlier Codex Mendoza of Mexico, this kind of illustration was utterly foreign to the native South Americans, who did not have an art category for depictions of daily life. The only exception is among the Moche of Peru, who, it is suggested, showed the supernatural in daily clothing. However, a short perusal of medieval European art, in which the supernatural was likewise shown in modern dress, shows that this is different from illustrating lower-status people in ordinary lower-status clothing doing ordinary tasks. 5. A similar preparation was used in pre-Hispanic Central America and Mexico. 6. This is usually called “head deformation” by Euro-American writers, not one of whom would refer to modern cosmetic orthodontia or plastic surgery as “tooth deformation ,” “nasal deformation,” “jaw deformation,” “thigh deformation,” etc. A much less ethnocentric term is “head modification” or “cosmetic head modification.” 7. The introduction of the ceramic mold in late Chorrera times may have conNotes 316 Notes to Pages 27–45 tributed to the often unelaborated decoration of the head in simpler figurines of many styles. 8. Some unwary or overenthusiastic researchers have posited that the markings on Chorrera figurines represent actual pants and weskits, garments that are, in fact, totally unknown in ancient South America (cf. Anawalt 1998). A careful examination of Chorrera figurines with this pattern of painting and incision shows clearly that the artists were depicting body paint and, perhaps, tattooing, since details of breasts and genitals are shown. 9. Over forty-five rock-crystal bead “workshops” (actually clusters of debris from working rock crystal and then sweeping the floor) have been found at this very small site. Debris and beads broken in manufacture are common, whereas whole beads are rare. Crystal beads identical to those manufactured at Pirincay have been found in Chorrera burials, and Chorrera ceramics have been found at Pirincay, confirming the trade between coast and highlands. 10. Women as well as men wear capes, but the tabards and all-in-one suits seem to have been exclusively male garments. 11. Eduardo Kohn, an ethnologist and ethnobotanist who conducted research on medicinal plants used by indigenous peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon, has suggested two possibilities: Cordia nodosa and Croton lechleri. A decoction of the leaves of the former is used to treat both insect and snake bites, to combat infection, and to promote healing. Croton is widely used to promote the healing of wounds, and there are rumors that a U.S.-based pharmaceutical company is planning to market it sometime in the near future (Kohn 1992 and personal communication, 1993). 12. The term “Panzaleo” is used in a confusing manner in Ecuadorian archaeology. It refers variously to the sixteenth-century inhabitants of the region, to a 200 bc–ad 500 ceramic style from the vicinity of Riobamba, and to a second millennium bc type of nonrepresentational thin grey ceramics found from the region of Latacunga and Riobamba to the north of Quito, but probably manufactured in the eastern lowlands (Bray 1995). This contradictory use of the term “Panzaleo” is based on a bad habit that early archaeologists and others had of giving all the prehistoric remains from a region the name of the historic inhabitants. Since so many...