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9 THE COMING OF THE CHACHI For many archaeologists trained during the heyday of the New Archaeology, the terms diffusion and migration are still likely to invoke considerable antipathy. The whole agenda of the New Archaeology was to show how cultural change could be accounted for in terms of intrasystemic and local adaptations. As processes extraneous to such unfolding systems, diffusion and migration were dismissed as clumsy theoretical forfeitures. The problem with this stance is that diffusion and migration occur regularly in the course of human affairs. They have been central processes in prodUCing the world that we live in today, and it would be odd if past societies were insulated modules rather than nodes in similar diffusionary and migrational fields of extraregional extent. Nor does it seem reasonable to deny the existence of these processes that shunt people and things over considerable distances simply because we cannot explain why a particular case of diffusion or migration took place. In the following, I review an argument, the details of which are presented elsewhere (DeBoer 1995), that the Chachi entered the Cayapas basin from a former homeland in the Andes to the east. The historical and archaeological evidence indicates that this intrusion took place within the last two hundred years or so. It is not yet totally clear why or how this migration took place. The case for a recent Chachi migration into the Cayapas region rests on three classes of evidence: (1) Chachi oral traditions concerning their own history; (2) western historical accounts; and (3) the archaeological record. Each deserves separate discussion. On the basis of fieldwork carried out in 1909, Barrett (1925) summarized oral traditions that, with variations, the Chachi (Barrett's Cayapa) recount today. According to these traditions: "The original home of the people was in the mountains near Ibarra. At a time probably very near that of the advent of the first Spaniards, the Cayapas as a body moved to what is now known as Pueblo Viejo ... in the mountains drained by the upper course of the Rio Santiago. Various reasons are given for this migration, some affirming that it was because of their fear of the invaders (and, as one informant said, espeCially the fear of their horses), whereas others say that it was due to the general alteration in their mode oflife as a result of the conquest" (Barrett 1925: 31). Other informants claimed that this movement to Pueblo Viejo predated the arrival of the Spaniards and was in response to the Inca conquest of the northern highlands. Whichever conqueror prompted their exodus from the sierra, the Chachi were to find new enemies at Pueblo Viejo. These new and unfriendly neighbors were the Indios Bravos or "wild Indians," who "are said to have been 114 THE (OMING OF THE (HA(HI cannibals. They preyed constantly on the Cayapa, killing them whenever and wherever encountered. The Cayapa, on the other hand, were then, as they are now, a very peaceable people; but after many years of these outrages they organized war-parties which descended the rivers and exterminated the enemy" (Barrett 1925: 32). The accounts, undoubtedly tendentious in part, go on to present details concerning the geography of the retaliatory invasion that installed the Chachi in their present-day territory: "The Cayapa first attacked the Indios Bravos living along the Rio Zapallo Grande; next those along the Rio San Miguel; next those along the Rio Camarones; then those along La Herradura de Cayapas, and so on down the Rio Cayapas, up the Rio Onzole, and again down the Rio Cayapas to its confluence with the Rio Santiago" (Barrett 1925: 35). Thus the Chachi view their history in terms of a two-stage migration: the first from Ibarra (called by the Spanish loan word villa) to Pueblo Viejo (called Tusac in Chachi); the second from Pueblo Viejo on the upper Santiago to their current location on the Cayapas. The latter move involved defeat and displacement of the resident Indios Bravos. That "extermination" is too strong a word is intimated by the continuing Chachi belief that wisps of smoke seen far up the Rio Grande mark lingering encampments of their foes. The above story, abstracted from Barrett's rendering of Chachi traditions, appeals to western canons of historicity by excluding much of the idiom of the Chachi's own telling, a telling that includes jaguar guides, the shamanic capture of magical wands possessed by the Indios Bravos, and the intervention of birds that sing critical communiques to the...

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