Amazonian Quichua in the Western Amazon Regional Interaction Sphere

Amazonian Quichua (or Kichwa) occupy an area along the Napo, Curaray, and Bobonaza river systems.They are participants in a dynamic multi-ethnic system that includes Jivaroan Achuar and Shuar neighbors living southward to the Pastaza River and Waorani occupying the interfluvial area between the Upper Curaray and Napo rivers.Much of the area between and along the Curaray and Bobonaza rivers was formerly occupied by Zaparoan speaking Gaes and Zpara who were decimated by epidemic disease and internal conflict in the early 20th century.Survivors of this period of chaos married into Amazonian Quichua families living in settlements on the Bobonaza and Curaray rivers.Amazonian Quichua living along the Curaray River, who refer to themselves as Curaray Runa, are descendants of the Zpara who occupied the Curaray, intermarried with Napo Quichua, Canelos Quichua, and Achuar.Through in-marriage with Quichua speakers, descendants of the Zpara say that they "hid" their identity as Zpara.Today, this identity is no longer hidden.Zpara, along with other ethnic groups in this region, have created indigenous organizations and become visible in national and international political arenas.In this paper, we present ethnographic and historical evidence of a regional interaction sphere within the Western Amazon in which ancestors of Amazonian Quichua participated, and which is remembered today in oral history. Amazonian Regional Systems in Prehistory and the Colonial PeriodAmazonian Quichua and their neighbors occupy an area which was in pre-hispanic times and during the colonial period part of a much larger regional interaction sphere.Through historic documentation, we can reconstruct this sphere as encompassing the Upper Amazon/Solimes River and its major tributaries: the Napo, Ucayali, Maran, Huallaga, and lower Ucayali rivers.Linkages from these rivers extended up into the Andean region to the west (Oberem 1967-68;Reeve 1994;Santos 1992; Taylor 1999) and overland up into the Rio Negro region to the north and east (Reeve 1994).Regional systems during the colonial period have been described also for the Vaups and Orinoco (Vidal 1999, 2000; Zucchi and Vidal 2000) to which the Western Amazon regional system was probably linked through Tupian-speaking Omagua living along the Amazon/Solimes (Reeve 1994).In another area of the Amazon, a regional system extant during the colonial period has been described for the Upper Xingu (Heckenberger 2011a(Heckenberger , 2005) ) and the Caribbean (Heckenberger 2011b).Recent archeological evidence suggests that regional systems are of significant time depth.Much of the Amazon appears to have been occupied by ethnolinguistic groups that were fluid and linked together in far-flung regional trade networks (Hornborg and Hill 2011) that were characterized by multiple linked settlements, some of which supported large populations (Heckenberger et al 2008;Heckenberger and Neves 2009; Hornborg and Hill 2011;Mann 2008).Archeologists see a major cultural transformation in some regions of the Amazon around 2000 years BP.Life-ways extant since the early Holocene were replaced by a cultural formation involving a more highly shared social organization (Neves 2011:37).Hornborg and Hill, in their important work on Amazonian regional systems (2011), have argued that three major expansions occurred: first by Carib, then Arawakan-speaking