Researchers from Canada’s University of Calgary have given to Ecuador 166 crates of human remains and artifacts belonging to the Valdivia culture. The returned items include five human skeletons, a type of well-known ceramic figurine known as the “Venus of Valdivia,“ and all of the information on Valdivia the Canadians had gotten from studying the artifacts.
The objects were excavated in southwestern Ecuador during the early 1980s and removed to Canada. They date to between 3800 and 1500 BCE, and have changed perceptions of Ecuador’s development pre-contact. It had been previously thought that the first populations to settle and develop pottery were people who lived along the coast. But studying the Valdivia artifacts suggest that pottery – and thus settlements – were developed first inland. In other words it was farmers, not fishermen, who developed pottery first.
