Quito, Ecuador's metropolis on the Andean heights, has in earlier incarnations been a Spanish colonial city, an Inca provincial capital, and a crossroads of pre-Incaic aboriginal peoples. Most of the remains which Quito's past has left to us – documents, handiworks, folkloric memories – are palimpsest-like artifacts on which various peoples and ages have left their messages superimposed. Any scholar, whether anthropologist, archaeologist, or historian, must begin his work with the discovery of their stratigraphy, separating out superimposed texts. Only then is there a hope of reconstructing past civilizations and the forces that shaped their succession.

But if the record is a palimpsest, it is not one of those on which a miscellany of unrelated texts has been written. Rather, each successive text is, in a sense, a commentary on the preceding ones; and all share a common theme, the relation between the author's culture and its natural and human environment. Each of the authors has been influenced by the very text which his own writing obscures.

The present work deals with two of these authors substantively, the pre-Incaic aboriginal societies and the Inca empire, and a third heuristically, the Spanish regime through whose records we have some verbal evidence about the first two. Its central goal is to reconstruct the political and economic institutions of the oldest and most obscured stratum, aboriginal Quito.

To Quiteños it will look obvious why the strands of testimony are worth disentangling.