Q&A with Elaine A. Peña on Celebrating Washington’s Birthday at the US-Mexico Border

Since 1898, residents of Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, have reached across the US-Mexico border to celebrate this country's first president George Washington's birthday. The celebration can last a whole month, with parade goers reveling in American and Mexican symbols; George Washington saluting; and “Pocahontas” riding on horseback. An international bridge ceremony, the heart and soul of the festivities, features children from both sides of the border marching toward each other to link the cities with an embrace.

Elaine A. Peña's book ¡Viva George! offers an ethnography and a history of this celebration, which emerges as both

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symbol and substance of cross-border community life. Anthropologist and Laredo native Elaine A. Peña shows how generations of border officials, civil society organizers, and everyday people have used the bridge ritual to protect shared economic and security interests as well as negotiate tensions amid natural disasters, drug-war violence, and immigration debates.

Drawing on previously unknown sources and extensive fieldwork, Peña finds that border enactments like Washington's birthday are more than goodwill gestures. From the Rio Grande to the 38th Parallel, they do the meaningful political work that partisan polemics cannot.

This week, we will be attending the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting virtually, during which we will offer a discount on our new and award-winning anthropology books. Apply the discount code EXAA during checkout on www.utexaspress.com to receive 30% off the full list price of any book, plus free domestic shipping.

To celebrate the publication of her book, we asked Dr. Peña some questions about her research.

Please describe the WBC’s International Bridge Ceremony, and what questions you wanted to answer by focusing on this performance?

The ceremony features two children representing the U.S. and two children representing Mexico walking toward each other on the Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge to share a picture-perfect embrace and to exchange national flags. Other actors, mostly political figures and business leaders from both sides of the border, also share embraces and exchange well wishes. The ritual has taken place in some shape or form since the celebration’s inception in 1898.

Focusing on the bridge ceremony allowed me to trace shifts in cross-border cooperation across several decades and, more importantly, to see how Mexican actors have supported this ostensibly U.S.-centric celebration. I was interested to see if the balance of the ritual—two sides coming together with tight choreography annually for over a century—carried over to everyday border interactions or had an impact on how port-of-entry actors dealt with shared problems and/or opportunities linked to trade, immigration, and security. I took a specific interest in the history and uses of the international bridge because it is co-owned by the Mexican government and the city of Laredo. I thought, well, there are insurmountable inequities that affect that border in terms of poverty and documentation vulnerabilities, for example, but the international bridge—an exemplar of border infrastructure—is co-owned. Both sides share it and thus manage responsibilities and power. Having that conceptual ground to stand on allowed me to dive into the archives and into ethnographic fieldwork with greater attention to what border actors do—how they find innovative ways to cooperate during times of crisis. Focusing on how border actors have festively repurposed the International Bridge Ceremony not only challenges but also empirically denies popular narratives of border dysfunction.

What were your early experiences of the festival, and how has your impression/consumption/participation of it changed over several decades?

We moved around a lot and lived in different places downtown during my childhood so I was used to seeing and interacting with people gathering for the parade. I would work the parade sometimes, selling cold sodas and water. My favorite parade participants were the Mexican tumblers. They would do amazing tricks! Other than that, we would go to the carnival or to the jalapeño festival if we could afford it that year. This is all to say that I was aware of the celebration, and definitely of the beauty and glamour of the debutantes, but I didn’t wonder about it too much. I had other things on my mind as a kid.

Things changed once I got to high school because a lot of my classmates participated in the festivities as debutantes or as escorts. They worked so hard to get selected and they had so many commitments. It was intense.

I went to the Princess Pocahontas pageant in 1996 because my best friend was Pocahontas. That was a really weird moment for my sixteen-year-old self. It was the first time I had attended a “high-class” event and I was really confused by what I saw and heard about Native American tribes. I didn’t know what “playing Indian” was at the time and I didn’t have the vocabulary to work things out, so I was left with a lot of questions.

I began to attend a wide range of celebration events once I decided to work on the celebration as an academic, about ten years after that moment. I attended as many events as I could between 2006 and 2017, including the International Bridge Ceremony, the Pocahontas and Society of Martha Washington pageants, LULAC’s Noche Mexicana gala, the Caballeros de la República del Río Grande cocktail party, and the Mr. South Texas luncheon. I also attended WBCA events in Nuevo Laredo and celebration events hosted by the municipality of Nuevo Laredo. These upper-echelon gatherings gave me insight into why rituals persist, how they are practiced across generations, and how they benefit border business.

The era of paso libre is, as you say, a puzzle. Would you describe paso libre and the incongruous context in which it existed for twenty years?

Paso libre coincided with the International Bridge Ceremony in February 1957. That year, the ritual doubled as the public inauguration of the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge. Dangerous water levels created by Hurricane Alice had destroyed the existing bridge at the end of July 1954. Paso libre was part of an agreement to make the newly constructed bridge operational, and it extended free bridge crossing privileges during the celebration in either direction. In practice, this meant that Mexican citizens could cross the border into the U.S. without having to show documentation every February between 1957 and 1976. Thousands of people crossed the border peacefully and safely during that time.

It took me quite a long time comparing uncatalogued documents in the archives, but I finally figured out that paso libre was a peace-building/port business–securing gesture initiated by U.S. actors, including the INS and the State Department, to persuade Mexican officials to formally open their side of the international bridge. I spoke with as many people as I could who remembered that time and I was lucky enough to locate photos of paso libre at different moments during the phenomenon. I remember coming across photos from the early 1960s showing families walking hand-in-hand across the bridge as well as Mexican military cadets. Photos of the early 1970s are absolutely spectacular because they feature thousands of people walking across the border as part of the bridge ceremony. By that time, anti-immigrant narratives were not only becoming more widespread in the U.S. but were also being politicized as part of the War on Drugs campaign launched by President Nixon in 1969.

It is just mind-blowing to think that paso libre persisted, with lots of fanfare and without incident, for almost twenty years. It is also incredible that paso libre was covered (negatively) by major newspapers like the Los Angeles Times during that period (early 1970s) but was never questioned by academics or mentioned in the history books. ¡Viva George! is the first study to do so.

What aspect of the ceremony does the cover of your book depict, and what is its historical and also logistical significance?

The cover depicts a transformative moment in the bridge ceremony ritual. The children’s embrace in the middle of the bridge is the culmination of months and months of cross-border collaboration between Mexican and U.S. actors. This coordination is sometimes conducted under extreme duress—political pressure to secure the border, etc.—but still, in that moment, the ritual makes visible and palpable the fact that both sides can work together.

You embedded yourself in both archival and ethnographic research. What kinds of activities and participation did your ethnographic research entail?

In addition to conducting archival research in Waco; San Antonio; Austin; Washington, DC; Mexico City; Laredo; and Nuevo Laredo, I spent a lot of time in the field—during the celebration, of course, but also during summers, academic breaks, and sabbatical years. The celebration unfolds in February, but planning happens year-round. I met with WBCA actors, past and present, individually and in groups on several occasions. I attended the planning meetings of bi-nationally focused organizations like the International Good Neighbor Council–Laredo, the Consejo Internacional de Buena Vecindad–Nuevo Laredo, and LULAC Council #12, but I also attended special committee meetings with city officials focused on border security and celebration logistics. I went to dress fittings and rehearsals with the abrazo children and their families. I traveled to Washington, DC, with WBCA actors headed to the annual Laredo Day event on the Hill in early March.

It was also important for me to participate in the International Bridge Ceremony as often as possible and from several different vantage points. One year I headed out to the bridge at 5:00 a.m. to help set things up and to get an up-close and personal take on how international bridge personnel do not close but “redirect” traffic while the ritual unfolds. Another year, I traveled from Nuevo Laredo with Mexican representatives to the bridge ceremony.

Elaine A. Peña is an associate professor of American Studies at George Washington University and author of Performing Piety: Making Space Sacred with the Virgin of Guadalupe. Her work has been recognized by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists.

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Q&A with Slavery and Utopia author Fernando Santos-Granero

In the first half of the twentieth century, a charismatic Peruvian Amazonian Indigenous chief played a key role in leading his people, the Ashaninka, through the chaos generated by the collapse of the rubber economy in 1910 and the subsequent pressures of colonists, missionaries, and government officials to assimilate them into the national society. In Slavery and Utopia, Fernando Santos-Granero reconstructs the life and political trajectory of the leader known as José Carlos Amaringo Chico. The people called him Tasorentsi, which is the name the Ashaninka give to the world-transforming gods and divine emissaries that come to this earth to aid the Ashaninka in times of crisis.

Santos-Granero demonstrates that, despite Tasorentsi’s constant self-reinventions, the chief never forsook his millenarian beliefs, anti-slavery discourse, or efforts to liberate his people from white-mestizo oppression. Slavery and Utopia thus convincingly refutes those who claim that the Ashaninka proclivity to messianism is an anthropological invention. We asked Fernando Santos-Granero a few questions about his book, the continued murders of Indigenous leaders in Guatemala and Brazil, and the evolution of Indigenous resistance.

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Describe the self-reinventions of Tasorentsi, the messianic Ashaninka leader that is the focus of your study.

José Carlos Amaringo Chico, also known as Tasorentsi, or “all-powerful blower world transformer,” lived during a tumultuous period in the history of Peruvian Amazonia, from the beginning of the rubber boom era, around 1875, to the beginning of the mass colonization of the region in the late 1950s. Throughout this period, Tasorentsi went through multiple and dramatic changes, sometimes in response to external events and sometimes as the result of an inner, moral conversion. In all these instances, he was able to reinvent himself in such a way as to maintain a leading position as either a secular chief or a divine emissary, or a combination of both.

As a young boy, he began working as a debt-peon for a local rubber extractor. During that time, he learned Spanish, became acquainted with the ways of white people, and acquired his Christian name. At around eighteen, he escaped from his boss and begun acting as an intermediary in the slave trade that was promoted and controlled by white rubber extractors and their Indigenous partners. Later on, he was directly involved in the capture of Indigenous slaves and was feared as a renowned warrior chief and shaman. In his mid-thirties, however, he experienced his first moral conversion and quit his slaving activities. Combining an anti-slavery and anti-white discourse with millenarian promises, he inspired a widespread Ashaninka movement that changed the region’s social landscape in the aftermath of the rubber era (1912–1914). 

Conibo group, Ucayali River, 1900s. Known as “Lords of the Ucayali” for the dominion they had historically exerted as pirates and raiders along the Ucayali River, the Conibo together with the Shipibo played an important role in the 1915 uprising and were harshly persecuted. Some of their leaders were captured and sent to prison in Iquitos. Source: A. Miles Moss, A Trip into the Interior of Peru (Lima: Printed by Charles F. Southwell, 1909), 106. Courtesy of the Biblioteca Nacional del Perú.

A year later, in 1915, he expanded his influence throughout the region, becoming the paramount leader of a multiethnic uprising of the Ashaninka, Conibo, Yine, and Amahuaca, who until then had been bitter enemies. This feat was only possible through a millenarian discourse that promised liberation from white people, a deep transformation of the world, and the attainment of immortality. With the help of former Indigenous slavers, whom he convinced to join him, he managed to expel most rubber extractors from the region. In time, the government crushed the uprising and Tasorentsi had to hide, but for many years the region was free of white slavers. In the 1920s, having heard of the arrival of a “white god”—Adventist missionary Ferdinand Stahl– Tasorentsi experienced his second moral conversion, adopting an indigenized version of Adventist doctrine, abandoning violence as a means of fighting for the rights of his people, and becoming a very active “people-gatherer” on behalf of the Adventist Church. He never agreed to baptize, for this would have interfered with his shamanic activities and, particularly, with the ayahuasca séances he led to speed up Christ’s second coming.

Although the region’s white landowners pursued, imprisoned, and tortured him, Tasorentsi never stopped fighting for his people’s rights. During the remainder of his life, he promoted the nucleation of people in small settlements to await the arrival of Christ, while at the same time supporting peaceful coexistence with white people. At the same time, however, he encouraged Indigenous economic autonomy, strongly opposed debt-peonage, and endorsed formal schooling as a means of leveling the playing field with white people.

How has the field of anthropology contributed to the "historical amnesia" apparently surrounding the struggles of the Ashaninka?

On the contrary, anthropologists have been crucial in highlighting the long history of Ashaninka resistance against white oppression. Stefano Varese, Eduardo Fernández, Michael Brown, Soren Hvalkof, and Mariella Villasante, to name but a few, have written extensively on Ashaninka past and present-day struggles. Ashaninka people remember their struggles, which are often the main subject of their oral histories. For various reasons, however, in Ashaninka oral tradition there has been less focus on Tasorentsi’s struggles than on other confrontations with white people. I believe the main reason for this “historical amnesia” is that Tasorentsi was not a doctrinally pure Adventist, and the Adventist hierarchy therefore regarded him as somewhat suspect and left him out of their historical narratives; thus, many present-day Ashaninka Adventists do not remember him. This has been compounded by the fact that, for various reasons, Tasorentsi’s political activities have escaped the notice of Amazonianist anthropologists and historians. The main reason for this omission has been the fact that Franciscan missionaries, with the Jesuits, were Peruvian Amazonia’s main early historians, and they had no presence in this region at the time of Tasorentsi’s uprisings. My main objective in writing this book has been to draw attention to this remarkable individual, reintroducing him into Ashaninka historical consciousness and opening the subject to academic scrutiny.

Can you describe the immense body of original materials that you researched for this book? What were the most surprising discoveries to come out of those archival documents, oral histories, musical recordings, and visual works?

I did research in numerous archives and libraries in Peru and the United States. One of my first surprises was learning that the regional and national press had amply covered Tasorentsi’s Ashaninka movement of 1912–1914 and the 1915 multiethnic uprising. Not only that, it also brought to national attention the plight of Amazonian Indigenous peoples under the oppressive labor conditions of the rubber era, generating a heated debate about the causes of Indigenous hostilities. What surprised me was that many journalists and personalities justified Indigenous violence as being the direct result of the oppression and slaving activities of white rubber extractors. Also surprising was the amount of documentation generated by the conflicts between Adventist missionaries and their Indigenous supporters, on the one hand, and white landowners and regional authorities, on the other. The fact that Adventist missionaries were often US citizens of German ancestry meant that every time they were harassed, they informed their consulates. The latter pressured the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which, in turn, prompted regional authorities to investigate the matter. A great amount of information on Tasorentsi’s activities as an Adventist people-gatherer was preserved through this means.

Score of Tasorentsi’s song. Tasorentsi’s song does not resemble any of the known styles of Ashaninka songs, but it has some of the gravity of beshiriantsi worshipping songs. It betrays elements of both the Andean huaynos of the neighboring highland peoples of Pasco and Junín and the ancient Catholic hymns sung in Franciscan missions during colonial times. Courtesy of Bernd Brabec de Mori.

Yet another surprise was the realization that anthropologists who had worked among the Ashaninka in the 1960s and 1980s, such as John Bodley and Jeremy Narby, had collected much information about Tasorentsi’s activities and were generous enough to share it with me. Especially important was a song composed by Tasorentsi and recorded by Narby, provided by someone who had learned it when he was a child. In this song, the charismatic leader encourages his listeners to seek their Father, the solar divinity; announces that the divinity is coming, that he is near; and reveals that he awaits his people in the Sky River of Youth and will make them immortal. I never expected to obtain such a direct testimony of Tasorentsi’s millenarian discourse: one that allowed me to understand the appeal that he had for the region’s Indigenous peoples.

Equally surprising was the fact that I managed to find not one but three photographs of Tasorentsi—a remarkable feat given that they were taken in the 1920s. My greatest surprise, however, was to meet Tasorentsi’s youngest son. I knew that Tasorentsi had had many children and that his descendants lived somewhere along the Pachitea River. One day, an Ashaninka leader, Alcides Calderón, told me that he knew one of Tasorentsi’s nephews and that he was willing to accompany me to interview him. After a long boat trip, we arrived in Segundo Arroyo’s home. As it happened, he was not Tasorentsi’s nephew, but his youngest son. What he shared with me about his father’s last years and death, about which I knew little, helped me finish my book. But, more importantly, knowing him allowed me to perceive Tasorentsi, who until then had been only a historical figure to me, as a real, flesh-and-blood person with many gray areas, like any human being.

Could a figure like Tasorentsi emerge today, and how might the Peruvian authorities and transnational entities respond?

We know of many charismatic Indigenous leaders –whether Ashaninka or not—who, through a millenarian and anti-white discourse, managed to mobilize the Ashaninka against white domination. The best known of these leaders was Juan Santos Atahualpa, a man of Andean origin who, in the mid-eighteenth century, managed to unite the Ashaninka and their Amazonian neighbors to fight the Spaniards. But there were others in the 1890s, the 1910s, the 1940s, and the 1960s, and even as late as the 1970s. So it is quite possible that a figure like Tasorentsi might emerge once more. In fact, a few years ago, during a time of fast and aggressive expansion of extractive activities (oil, gas, timber, and gold) in Ashaninka territory, all kinds of rumors began to spread about how white people intended to exterminate the Ashaninka by abducting people using mysterious flying machines. This created the kind of frenzy that characterizes the early stages of Ashaninka world-transforming movements.

I imagine that if a Tasorentsi-like figure appeared today, the response of the State, extractive companies, and regional authorities would be similar to that of their peers in past ages—to wit, they would attempt to silence him or her through whatever means possible. The only advantage that such a figure would have today is that communication is so fast and widespread that it would be difficult to suppress him or her without generating national and international outrage. Yet the killing of Indigenous leaders continues in Guatemala and Brazil, to name just a few examples, and nothing much happens.

Tell us what you are working on in your role at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

At present, I am engaged in a new research project titled “The Reconquest of Chanchamayo: Frontier Expansion, Modernization, and Nation-Building in Postcolonial Peru, 1847–1891”. The reconquest of Chanchamayo, the Amazon region closest to Peru’s capital, took place in the context of the rapid expansion of internal frontiers that swept the Americas in the second half of the nineteenth century. It overlapped the conquest of the West in the United States (1848–1881), the occupation of Araucania in Chile (1861–1883), the conquest of Patagonia in Argentina (1872–1884), and Brazil’s march toward the west, which began in 1864 and has not ended yet.

The reconquest of Chanchamayo—a region that was free from white presence from 1742 to 1847—was seemingly prompted by President Ramón Castilla’s vision of a more modern, civilized, and territorially integrated country. There is evidence, however, that the economic interests of Andean landowners and miners and the civilizing agenda of Franciscan missionaries may have lurked in the background, prompting the State to “reduce” the local Yanesha and Ashaninka populations and occupy their lands. The objective of this project is to disentangle the relative weight of these various social actors in achieving these goals. At the same time, it seeks to examine the position of these actors with regard to what was then called “the Indian problem,” and assess how their goals and actions shaped the evolution of Indigenous resistance. Combining archival materials with oral sources, I intend to bring back to life the voices of these diverse actors and, especially, to rescue from oblivion the will, agency, and creative thinking of the Yanesha and Ashaninka peoples.

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'Amazonia in the Anthropocene' Q&A with Nicholas Kawa

Our latest author Q&A features Nicholas Kawa talking about his new book Amazonia in the Anthropocene: People, Soils, Plants, Forests. Professor Kawa researches biodiversity management and agricultural sustainability in the Amazon region at the Ohio State University. This timely study explores how pre-Columbian Amerindians and contemporary rural Amazonians have shaped their environment and how that environment sometimes resists human manipulation and control. With implications for the human role in global environmental

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change, Amazonia in the Anthropocene engages the concept of the Anthropocene by tackling its problems and paradoxes from the vantage point of the world’s largest tropical rainforest. We asked him about his work, what we can learn from contemporary rural Amazonians, and the complicated identity politics of indigenous rights.


This week in New York City, Latin Americanists from all over the world will gather to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). We'll be there to salute LASA for 50 years of fostering intellectual discussion, research, and teaching on Latin America, the Caribbean, and its people throughout the Americas. We invite attendees to stop by our booth at the 2016 annual meeting for our newest titles, to pick up a subject catalog, and for an exclusive LASA offer.

Explain the concept of the Anthropocene and how your work wrestles with defining this “new” geological epoch.

The Anthropocene is rooted in the idea that human activity on the planet has been so impactful and pervasive that we have ushered in a new epoch in geological time. Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, is recognized for popularizing the term in 2000. However, in the past five years or so, it has really gained traction. It is not just being adopted by natural and physical scientists but also social scientists and scholars in the humanities. This is what I really appreciate about the concept of the Anthropocene: it’s encouraging truly interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary dialogue. As a consequence, it has also generated considerable debate and controversy. One of the current debates centers on the origins of the Anthropocene. When did it begin? Crutzen and a few of his colleagues have traced it back to European industrialization while other scholars have suggested that it began with the development of agriculture. Still others have promoted later origin points including World War II and the radiological signatures left by the atom bomb. Most recently, a team of geologists has claimed that industrial plastics will stratigraphically define this new epoch. Regardless of when the Anthropocene began (which is a debate that will likely carry on), most scholars link it to the rise of modern industrialization and global capitalism.

In this book, I look at the Anthropocene from the vantage point of the rural Brazilian Amazon. In doing so, I highlight some of the problems with its current conceptualization. One problem I point out is its subtle Eurocentrism. In tracing the origins of the Anthropocene to industrial Europe, it is overlooked that people across the world have been implicated in and directly linked to the broader processes driving the Anthropocene. I show, for example, that many of rural Amazonia’s contemporary inhabitants are descendants of migrants who moved to the region to tap natural rubber, which fueled the burgeoning tire and automobile industries in North America and Europe. Another problem I highlight is the anthropocentrism embedded within the concept of the Anthropocene. While it’s suggested that humans are coming to dominate the planet, every day we get news about how various forces and life-forms that make up our environment are constantly pushing back against us: hurricanes, tsunamis, the Zika virus, flesh-eating microbes, and CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere. The Anthropocene should remind us that while our technologies have expanded our ability to impact the planet, a much broader array of life-forms and forces is constantly thwarting our attempts to wrest control of the world around us.

American Anthropologist :: Viewpoints

Viewpoints
Mary Strong, Text Editor
Leana Wilder, Visual Editor
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Visual Anthropology Book Review
Viewpoints: Visual Anthropologists at Work edited by Mary Strong and Laena Wilder

Viewpoints: Visual Anthropologists at Work provides a readily accessible survey of the types of work conducted by visual anthropologists. Admirably showcasing practitioners’ struggles and successes alike, this volume is organized into four major sections and serves well as an introductory survey text. Particular strengths include a highly accessible layout comprised of large glossy pages, numerous images with extensive captioning, and broad margins for annotation. Also noteworthy, most chapters conclude with suggested exercises, projects, and assignments for practicing different approaches to visual anthropology. Indeed, several such projects could easily be linked to form the backbone of a visual anthropology course or lab. Particularly strong chapters include chapters 1–4, which provide a rich survey of the possibilities of anthropological photography; chapter 6, which excels in unpacking the construction of ethnographic film; and chapter 7, which explicates film and multimedia's evocative potentials. Less mainstream approaches are particularly well served by chapters 9 and 10. The glossary of terms (pp. 388–397) and persons (pp. 397–405) provides helpful references and resources for students.

The first and strongest section, “Photography Now,” provides three perspectives on creating and working with still images. Chapter 1, by Malcolm Collier, explores photography as a “formal tool for social and cultural research” (p. 13). This includes making and analyzing photographs, photo elicitation, and integrating words and images. Chapter 2, by Laena Wilder, highlights photography's evocative potential, the importance of rapport with those photographed, and the photographer's responsibility to those photographed. Rounding out this section, in chapter 3 Richard Freeman uses text and image to persuasively and beautifully illustrate photography's narrative potential.

Whereas section 1 focuses on photography, section 2, “Images from the Past,” provides two perspectives on working with extant photographs. In chapter 4, Joanna Cohan Scherer uses photographs of North American Indians from the Smithsonian to draw attention to the importance of critically evaluating archival images. In contrast, chapter 5, by Julie Flowerday, highlights the potential of historical images for facilitating historical comparisons.

Read the review in full at onlinelibrary.wiley.com »

CBS News :: History of the Inca Empire

History of the Inca Empire

By Bernabe Cobo
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Incan fortresses reveal evidence of ancient war

Findings point to Inca war just prior to arrival of Spanish conquistadors in the Andes

June 1, 2011

(Livescience.com) Incan fortresses built some 500 years ago have been discovered along an extinct volcano in northern Ecuador, revealing evidence of a war fought by the Inca just before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Andes.

"We're seeing evidence for a pre-Columbian frontier, or borderline, that we think existed between Inca fortresses and Ecuadorian people's fortresses," project director Samuel Connell, of Foothill College in California, told LiveScience.

The team has identified what they think are 20 fortresses built by the Inca and two forts that were built by a people from Ecuador known as the Cayambe. The volcano is called Pambamarca. (Photos of the Inca fortress site)

The team's research was presented in March at the 76th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA), in Sacramento, Calif.

"We know that there are many, many fortresses throughout northern Ecuador that haven't been identified one way or the other," said Chad Gifford, of Columbia University, who is also a project director.

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