La domesticación del agua en la cuenca superior del río Upano durante la época prehispánica Una re-conceptualización necesaria

– Research on the characteristics of the archaeological complex of the upper Upano river basin (Morona Santiago Province, Ecuadorian Amazon) has emphasized a priori the concept of “city,” leading to the assumption of an apocalyptic collapse of the entire region towards the middle of the first millennium AD, forgetting first of all to understand the functional relationship between the location of the archaeological sites and the paleo-hydrodynamics of the Upano river basin. In this paper we present petrographic and geochemical studies of the soils, the palaeo-hydrology of the environment, and the architectural patterns registered on the archaeological complex. On this basis, we suggest that the palaeo-pluvial regime played a fundamental role in assessing the construction of the Upano archaeological complex. In the light of this inaugural hypothesis, a re-conceptualization and new descriptive terminology of the known archaeological features in the region is required.