Southern Ecuador was once home to a fascinating indigenous game which was a literal battle for survival. Deeply rooted in the cultural traditions of the provinces of Azuay and Cañar, Pucara , also...
The iconic Panama hat entered public consciousness by gracing the heads of cherished film stars like Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart. But did you know that the Panama hat actually originated in...
Back in the 1730s, a group of daring Frenchmen embarked on a mission to calculate the true size and shape of the Earth. Led by Charles Marie de la Condamine as part of the famed French Geodesic...
The notion that pre-Columbian cultures from Europe, Africa, or Asia sailed across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to discover America, is a popular theory backed by numerous books and television...
A team of Canadian researchers have accomplished a feat that up to now had proven impossible. As they explain in an article just published in the journal PLOS One , they used clinical computed...
In 1532, following a lengthy civil war with his brother Huascar, Inca emperor Atahualpa was captured by Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro who seized the opportunity to conquer the lands of the...
The Yumbo of Ecuador first came to their Sacred Valley of Tulipe in around 800 BC. They were at that time peace-loving farmers. But what they left behind showed that, with their skills as merchants...
This week an unassuming Ecuadorian hacienda became a site of archaeological interest. Workers accidentally discovered a mound containing multiple Pre-Hispanic ceramic funerary urns while using heavy...
Embarking on the journey of establishing your very own empire is without a doubt a hefty and daunting task. But for the famous Inca ruler Pachacuti, it was a fated endeavor. Through ruthless conquest...
The construction of a long-awaited irrigation water tank will have to wait a little longer for farmers living in the central region of Ecuador. When work began they found ancient human remains and...
The fossilized remains of 22 Ice Age, elephant sized sloths have been found preserved in 20,000-year-old asphalt in Ecuador. The discovery of this giant sloth death pit is revealing a virtual Bible...
The Cueva de Los Tayos Expedition 2019 was an adventure no one will forget! Our expedition had two main goals – to find more cave entrances and to solve the mystery of the rock formations we called...
The fossils of a previously unknown titanosaur have been found in Ecuador. The medium to small-sized dinosaur lived 85 million years ago, during the Upper Cretaceous period. Its remains were...
Archaeologists in Ecuador have found two buried infants wearing “helmets” fashioned from the skulls of two other children. The ritual complex and funerary platform of Salango on the central coast of...
Headhunting is a practice that has been carried out by numerous cultures throughout the world. For instance, during the Qin dynasty in ancient China it is claimed that soldiers collected the heads of...
Archaeologists working at the pre-Hispanic site of Real Alto near the coast of Ecuador have discovered the remnants of a mysterious culture dating to the earliest stages of inhabitation in the...
The Amazon rainforest is home to more uncontacted tribes than anywhere else in the world. It is hard to imagine that even today, there are more than 100 tribes who have never seen anything outside...
Las Vegas doesn’t just refer to the ‘city of lights’; for archaeologists in Ecuador Las Vegas also denotes an ancient culture that once thrived on the Pacific coast. But just because a culture is...
[Read Part 1] [Read Part 2] This is the thrilling conclusion to the investigation on the true mystery regarding the Tayos Caves – what has happened to the pure, prestigious, and lustrous golden ore?...
[Read Part 1] This investigation acknowledges that more than one party was in involved in illegal gold extraction, and that gold may have been extracted in more than one form. That said, let’s...
The Tayos Caves ( Cuevas de los Tayos in Spanish) in Ecuador are a subterranean complex that forms part of the incredible Napo System of Caves stretching from Venezuela to Chile. The Tayos Caves have...
The archaeological sites in Ecuador are often overshadowed by more popular locations in neighboring Colombia and Peru. However, archaeology enthusiasts have a wealth of options including more than...
“That plant will save you from a poisonous snake bite,” my Kichwa guide, Pidru, pointed out as I tried to remove my boot from a foot of mud in the depths of the Amazon jungle in Ecuador. “And this...
Archaeologists have found many artifacts that suggest Blacks lived in Pre-Columbian America in locations including Tiahuanaco and Valdivia. Epigraphers and archaeologists have even found evidence...