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1 JKETCHING THE JEQUENCE The construction of a reliable chronology is a basic archaeological task. Without a sound chronology, any inferences about subsistence, settlement, or social systems in the past are likely to be historical monstrosities. The main mission of this chapter is to develop a cultural sequence for the Santiago and Cayapas basins on the basis of stratigraphy, seriation, and a set of not always friendly radiocarbon dates. The sketched sequence is preliminary and not without problems. Before the actual material is confronted, a confession should be aired. The follOwing is written, by and large, in a confirmatory mode. After surface collecting scores of sites, digging several stratigraphic probes, and drawing thousands of the recovered artifacts, I became fairly well acquainted with the range of artifact variability in the sampled archaeological record and, on the basis of this familiarity, formed some strong impressions about what the chronological sequence ought to be. It would be the conventional lie of the scientific method to suggest that the following exercises are "discovering" the chronology. Rather, they are evaluating (and rationalizing to colleagues) discoveries already made. These hypotheses or hunches are phrased in terms of phases, those "practicable and intelligible units of archaeological study" (Willey and Phillips 1958: 22). In principle, a phase is a taxonomic unit that is tightly defined in terms of time, space, and cultural content; in practice, however, it is often used more loosely to refer to any resolvable "chunk" of culture history that is too localized to be a "horizon" and too short-lived to be a tradition. Felicity aside, the following presentation is geared to phases composed of formally similar assemblages derived from both excavated and surface contexts. Whether such phases are arbitrary slices of an essentially seamless continuum in which everything is "transitional " or whether they represent real diSjunctures in the pace of change is an important issue best addressed once a sound relative chronology calibrated by independent chronometric dates is established. Now to the data, beginning with the stratigraphy of deposits and their encased artifacts. Stratigraphy Paul Bahn (1989: 62) provides a loose but otherwise permissible definition of stratigraphy: 'The different layers encountered in a site, one above the other. In general, given a pair of layers, the upper one is younger than the one that lies beneath." I would amend Bahns gloss by pointing out that, with exceptions, SKETCHING THE SEQUENCE 11 stratigraphic logic applies not only to layers but also to their associated cultural contents. The more serious should consult Harris's (1979) definitive treatment, although the spare and simple stratigraphic evidence from the Santiago-Cayapas does not require the complex wiring diagram of a "Harris matrix." Of several sites where limited excavations were conducted, four furnish evidence for ceramic stratigraphy. These cases can be described qUickly and are summarized in fig. 3.1. The details of excavation are given later. At C69, thick deposits of Guadual ceramics (see correlative chapters for the definition of this and other ceramic phases) are superposed over deposits containing a mix of Mafa and Selva Alegre sherds. Within the latter mix, however, Mafa sherds tend to have a deeper and probably precedent distribution. At nearby C36, deep Guadual deposits rest on a thin layer of Selva Alegre materials without Mafa admixture. As Mafa, Selva Alegre, and Guadual ceramics each occur repeatedly in single-component surface deposits, the combined evidence from C69 and C36 suggests a temporal sequence that runs from Mafa through Selva Alegre to Guadual. A third stratified site is C55, where a substantial Herradura midden covers a scatter of Guadual sherds including an associated pit filled with only Guadual materials. A fourth and final case is R30, where deep deposits of Las Cruces ceramics are separated from an underlying Selva Alegre midden by a virtually sterile clay layer. Although the R30 stratigraphy demonstrates the precedence of Selva Alegre to Las Cruces, it does not specify the temporal placement of the latter with respect to Guadual or Herradura. Such specification requires additional evidence. To anticipate such evidence, return to fig. 3.1, where a composite sequence, one only partly determined by stratigraphy, is presented. A seriational argument to be developed later places Tumbaviro after Herradura, while a number of specific features shared by Herradura and Las Cruces suggests that the two are essentially contemporary phases centering on the Cayapas and Santiago, respectively . Bouchard's (1985) ceramic sequence from the Tumaco region Gust across the Colombian border), outlined in the right-hand column of fig. 3.1...

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