Dependency and resistance in the Ecuadorian Colonial Amazon: a study of glass beads in a funerary urn

Abstract

Glass beads found in pre-Hispanic and colonial archaeological contexts in the Ecuadorian Amazon have not been frequently reported in the academic literature. Yet the unique discovery of this type of objects in a funerary urn in the collections of the Museo Arqueológico y Centro Cultural de Orellana (MACCCO-EP), which has been catalogued as belonging to the Napo phase, allows us to emphasise their use in mortuary practices prevailing in a colonial context with strong asymmetrical dependencies. This article aims to present a typological analysis of this set of glass beads so as to discuss exchange networks and the uses given to this material of European origin in colonial society and in indigenous Amazonian societies. A comparison of the results with other sets of glass beads in the Americas indicates that they were widely used between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries in various Amazonian secondary burial contexts in urns, thus allowing for the renewal and resistance of these practices in the colonial, and possibly also in the republican period.