The cotocollao culture is linked to archeology and belongs to a town of sedentary, farmers and potters who occupied the plateau of Quito, Ecuador, and its nearby valleys between 1500 and 500 BC.
The Aboriginal period is the first stage of the history of Ecuador that began from the moment the first inhabitants appeared in its territory and lasted until the arrival of the Europeans, from 1534.
According to various sources, the Cotocollao study began in 1976 when schoolchildren found several human bones near their school.
A pretty believable story if you know your funeral culture a little. It is believed that for the oldest funerals they used the husk to wrap their dead, but it was more common to put them in a communal tomb.
It is estimated that the cotocollao culture developed primitive trade routes that allowed it to interact with other aboriginal ethnic groups, although the exchange and the cultural influence that could result from this are not considerable in comparison with other Aboriginal relations of America by then, according to investigations .
Location of the Cotocollao culture
The location of this population, in a mountain towards a western tropical plain, allowed them to control varied resources and, also, to be forced path in the communication routes for the exchange of the products of the zone.
Like other pre-Columbian civilizations, co-co-culture had to face a series of adverse natural and terrestrial conditions that they had to overcome in order to effectively domesticate the land and guarantee the livelihood of society.
Cotocollao was a territory that had strong ties with Quito long before its incorporation as urban sector.
It was a rural area easily accessible by road, with flat pastures and a very productive land, reasons that made the region become an area quoted by the settlers of the time, who claimed donations of land to the king and permission to exploit the indigenous labor as part of their payment for having"conquered"the land.
Characteristics of the Cotocollao culture
The members of the co-co-op civilization took advantage of maize as the main element of their diet, complementing it with grains such as beans.
Hunting and incipient fishing were also part of the products that the cotocollao originated to meet the needs of the community.
Cotocollao dwellings were built with organic materials, whose compositions drove a rapid deterioration of these structures, which, years later, made it difficult to discover and appropriate research on the houses and buildings that were able to build the cotocollao.
It was the funerary remains the foundation on which work began for a better interpretation of this aboriginal culture.
The settlers of Cotocollao organized their villages in groups of 5 houses around the area of burial of the dead: thus they practiced the cult to their ancestors.
The custom was to bury them in cemeteries located in the center of the village in individual or collective tombs.
From the study of the skeletons found in the cemetery it is known that they carried out cranial deformation practices, with which some individuals sought to establish their status within the community.
Their most valuable contribution were the techniques to work the pottery. One of the most evolved ceramics of the Ecuadorian formative period was developed with multiple techniques and varied reasons. The bottle with stirrup handle, for example.
In addition, they used a paste of hailstones of pumice. The fact of working the stone in this way indicates a high technological level, to the point that these containers are considered as the most characteristic material feature of Cotocollao.
Ceremonies of culture Cotocollao
The groups that occupied the area of Cotocollao and the rivers and cordilleras bordering Quito were called"yumbos".
Every year the Cotocollao Yumbada Festival is held: a custom that brings together the Catholic tradition of Corpus Christi and the summer solstice every June 21, an event of the year that is especially important for the culture of the Yumbo people.
This festival has undergone many changes, since the now organizers of this traditional ritual, do not have enough knowledge of how it was developed and in honor of what was done.
The long history of Cotocollao as a center of pre-Columbian barter is the one that attracts the attention of the students of the Yumbada who want to understand the meaning and origins of the dance and to underline what is emphasized by today's participants when they say that the Yumbada more legitimate and ancestral belongs to Cotocollao.
It seems that the Fiesta de la Yumbada has created controversy among traditionalists and those who celebrate in the most modern ways, according to Kingman, this ancient ritual transformed serves to explain the situation of modern indigenous Quito.
In 2005, a resident of the neighborhood commented that the yumbos of the comparsa have nothing to do with the yumbos as an ethnic group from the northwest of Pichincha. He considers that it is an invention of Quichua to mimic the other groups.
Current participants and leaders strongly oppose this lie, ensuring that the dance represents a true relationship with their ancestral roots.
Cotocollao at present
Although the original members of the Cotocollao culture inhabited the region for about a millennium, the following generations, while maintaining a certain roots in their past, began to be influenced by other emerging societies.
In the current Ecuador has tried to recover the essence of these aborigines and their traditions.
When the Agrarian Reform came in 1963, at least 85% of Cotocollao's indigenous population worked under various types of servitude for the parish's estates, according to Borchart de Moreno in his book Los Yumbos.
The region of Cotocollao today is considered an urban area that maintains some of its most important archaeological sites as a vestige of the civilization that once inhabited the same lands, as well as the material preservation of its practices and its creations, maintaining the value funerary that was emphasized in his practices.
References
- Carvalho-Neto, P. d. (1964). Dictionary of Ecuadorian folklore. Quito: House of Ecuadorian Culture.
- Luciano, S. O. (2004). The Original Societies of Ecuador. Quito: Libresa.
- Moreno, B. d. (1981). The Yumbos. Quito.
- Quito Writing. (June 29, 2014). The Cotocollao Yumbada is an ancestral dance that lasts in time. The Telegraph .
- Reyes, O. (1934). General history of Ecuador. Quito: Andean.
- Salomon, F. (1997). The Yumbos, Niguas and Tsatchila. Quito: Abya-Yala Editions.