The Valdivia culture flourished from 3900 to 1500 BCE along present-day Ecuador’s coastal regions and its proximate forests. Because no other culture had been found in early Ecuador, the discovery of their settlements in Real Alto in the 1970s introduced the Valdivia to the contemporary world.1 From this discovery through the twentieth century’s waning years, archaeologists excavated remarkably rich layers of artifacts, tools, weapons, architectural objects, and pottery, and, from this material, temporal, and spatial data, reconstructed the Valdivia culture in chronological and cultural terms. In 1965, Betty Meggers, Clifford Evans, and Emilio Estrada, in their pioneering study of the Valdivia, divided the settlements into eight distinct, chronological phases (see Table 1.1).2 Once located in their respective phases, the artifacts were then used to measure the incremental steps in the culture’s lifespan, leading to the emergence of a standard analysis. When excavation and publication were curtailed after the late 1980s, efforts to rethink the Valdivia and the distinctive Ecuadorian contributions to this early timeframe ended as well.3 This chapter offers a review of the archaeological and anthropological frameworks that have been used to assess the Valdivia culture. It discusses how the timeline established by Meggers, Evans, and Estrada reinforced an essentialist Western interpretation of Valdivia culture and outlines how the biases of settler colonialism and imperialism have limited the understanding of Valdivian pottery. Finally, using critical disability theory (CDT) and Indigenous methodologies (IM), this chapter offers new strategies for reading Valdivia figurines.
Because of its abundance, pottery has been critical to tracing the Valdivia cultural presence within and across settlements. Relatively undisturbed, the pottery is noteworthy for several reasons. Crafted as early as 5000 BCE, these objects are among the earliest known ceramics in the Americas.4 The pottery also includes figurines which exhibit a range of corporeal features, among them multiple heads and torsos, anthropomorphism, cranial deformation, and male and female sexual organs in the same ceramic, making them the region’s first representations of human hybridity and sexual variety.5 Given this unprecedented confluence of firsts, Valdivian pottery, and figurines especially, have provided valuable insights into Valdivia culture, specifically pertaining to gender roles, the division of labor, and ritual and healing practices.6
A standard archaeological interpretation emerged from the data, one that remains the prevailing thinking about Valdivian Culture. In this narrative, the Valdivia began as nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived off the bounty of the Ecuadorean coastal regions.7 Prompted by population growth and associated collective needs, the Valdivia moved inland, transitioning over the next 2,500 years from loosely linked groups into settled, collectively organized agricultural communities.8 Eventually, their community exhausted its cultural capacities and resources, declined, and disappeared, giving way to other, more progressive cultures.9 This traditional narrative is well rehearsed in the scholarship on the Valdivia, but whose story is this? Not likely, I suggest, that of the Valdivia. Despite its basis in observable archaeological data, this conventional perspective is flawed in several significant respects. It is constrained within archaeological theory that relies on the presumed objectivity and universality of observable evidence, and it privileges the establishment of causal, linear, analytical patterns. When the ceramics are placed into cultural stages, the resulting analysis confirms the premises the excavations were designed to uncover, thereby imposing a simplistic, outdated mode of Western thinking onto a particular ancient Indigenous South American culture. This approach does not consider significant, contextual issues, such as the ways in which the Valdivia conceived of and represented indigeneity, gender, and bodily difference.
Table 1.1 Traditional Timeline of Valdivian Culture | Stage | Date/Phases | Substages |
| Early Stage | Phase I, 3900–3300 BCE | Palmar Plain Period A
Palmar Notched Period A
Palmar Incised Period A and B |
| Valdivia or “Classical” | Phase II, 3300–2950 BCE | |
| Phase III, 2950–2600 BCE | |
| Phase IV, 2600–2400 BCE | |
| Final Stage | Phase V, 2499–2200 BCE | |
| Phase VI, 2200–2000 BCE | Buena Vista
San Pablo |
| Phase VII, 2000–1800 BCE | |
| Phase VIII, 1800–1500 BCE | |
Building on the work of anthropologist Tamara Bray, who takes a situated perspective on early Ecuadorian cultures and questions the assumption that Ecuador constituted an undistinguished buffer zone between the Inca, the Aztec, and the Maya cultures, my study applies CDT and IM to select pottery fragments to challenge assumptions about the Valdivia.10 Bray’s work allows me to dismantle conventional perspectives and recognize the Valdivia culture’s own historicized, local positions and practices, whereas CDT rejects the assumptions that some bodies are normal and others deviant and IM dismantles oppression by looking directly at lived experiences. Although this reevaluation of Valdivia pottery cannot draw definitive conclusions about this ancient Indigenous culture any more than those it challenges, it does offer an alternative framework for the study of Valdivia pottery that allows for more nuanced readings. As I will show, the data, when reconsidered, reveals a culture whose perspective on lived experience relied on generalized notions of difference rather than explicit ideas of gender, disability, or bodily normality and deviancy. This reading of the pottery suggests that for the Valdivia, the body, in all its variety, was a focal point for conceptualizing their world and their place within it. This worldview was grounded in the collective, lived experiences of the Valdivia body, experiences incorporating the activities that these bodies performed and the many physical forms the bodies took into a community whole.11 This local perspective not only challenges assumptions about the body and indigeneity, but also deconstructs the myth of Valdivia Culture as monolithic.
Western Perspectives on Culture and Art
According to the conventional Western perspective on culture, humans are the highest form of life. Because humans alone can think, reason, and communicate with each other, they stand at the top of a hierarchy of earthly beings.12 Within that superior group, humans manifest various levels of physical and mental capacities. These capacities are measured by presumably universal criteria, ranging from relative depravity to excellence, and leading incrementally from least to most perfect, perfection being the goal to which all humans, individuals and groups alike, aspire. Within this range of humanity, more perfect individuals have more highly developed moral, intellectual, and conceptual capabilities as well as correspondingly advanced physical conditions and behaviors. Advanced capabilities of mind depend on logical, rational, and objective thinking; the correspondingly advanced body is proportioned, attractive, and functional, following the standards of the Western classical Greek ideal.13 Mental and physical superiority are manifest in advanced aesthetic, technological, and social systems. Conversely, the low end of the human hierarchy is filled by the “less evolved” races and cultures, those whose mental weaknesses are matched by their physical imperfections and the crude state of their aesthetic, technological, and social systems. This evolutionary framework is embodied in stereotypes such as the “noble savage” and “primitive savage.”14
In this anthropological framework, humans have unique abilities to think and reason, and based on these abilities, human communication is codified into standards. In this framework, the most advanced communication is found in written literacy.15 As the model for the best human thinking, written literacy is based on systematic criteria that are commensurate with the morals and behaviors of the superior individual. Specifically, written literacy depends on alphabetic letters which correspond to fixed words and associated ideas. In its highest form, therefore, such language can document and replicate facts and the ideas they represent and pass them on to future generations.16 Such objective, systematic means of communication underpins the fixed, linear reasoning that characterizes the most advanced humans and the highest human pursuit, science. Given their ability to communicate, humans are social beings and, accordingly, seek groups within which to interact. Accordingly, the more humans congregate the more they develop their mental and physical capacities and form more sophisticated groups. In this framework, human groups exist on a scale which leads from the least to the most advanced forms. This “cultural evolution of civilizations” is encapsulated in the movement from band and tribe to chiefdom and state. Whereas aboriginal groups are used as “ethnographic examples” of bands, Western countries such as France, England, and the United States are used to illustrate the highest form of civilization: the state.
Whereas written literacy provides systematic criteria for human thinking and actions, humans also have an outlet for expressing their subjective feelings. Art is that aesthetic form of expression. Because it is more subjective and less replicable, art is critical to conceptual advancement and, through its techniques, forms, and content, provides the means to measure human technical and conceptual development. This growth is measured by universal criteria that correspond to the cultural model. Accordingly, the most developed artwork, the work of developed cultures, is naturalistic, representational, and formally consistent. In contrast, according to this conventional perspective, the least mature artwork, that of primitive cultures, exhibits simplicity in content, form, and technique.17 Locating the Valdivia in this Western framework exposes further evidence of cultural hegemony as the values of settler colonialism and imperialism are imposed onto their society (labeled as chiefdoms) and their artwork (desig...
