If I had not happened to begin my Andean travels twenty years ago in what were once the rebellious hinterlands of the Inca empire, perhaps I would have shared most travelers' fascination with that ready-made “Andean world” about which the Incas still posthumously indoctrinate visitors to southern Peru. Instead, an Andeanist education that began at the periphery awoke me to something less familiar than the Inca empire, and, in my eyes, equally remarkable. This was the endurance, after some five centuries' alien imperial rule both Inca and Spanish, of Ecuadorian “Indian” collectivities still recognizably continuous with pre-Inca groups. How has it come about that the historical project of being “Cañari,” “Caranqui,” etc., went forward through so many episodes of domination, lacking as it did the armor of statecraft?

In principle, it was possible to do this achievement the homage of study via any of several Ecuadorian cases, but Quito had some advantages: a rich document record, relevance to major problems in both Inca and colonial studies, and the opportunity to combine archive work with residence in a Quichua-speaking village. Another reason for concentrating on Quito was that unlike adjacent “Indian” groups (in the regions of Otavalo and Riobamba, for example), whose societies appear distinctive to nonnative eyes because their cultures happen to include many traits we construe as “ethnic markers,” the Quichua-speaking people of Pichincha Province have been all but totally neglected by ethnography.