No single symposium or volume could do justice to the amount of information now available on Ecuadorian prehistory. This volume and the symposium on which it was based are devoted, therefore, to the archaeology of Formative Ecuador in order to bring new information on one of the most important periods of the region’s past to the attention of New World scholars.

While the volume includes two chapters on ideology and iconography, the focus is distinctly archaeological, with an emphasis on the fundamentals of archaeological science, including settlement patterns, subsistence, health, and ceramic variability.