Tolas in the Northern Andes: Plinths for Contesting Meanings
In March 2025, one of the retaining walls at the Inka site Malqui Machay in La Maná, Ecuador, fell down during an intense and atypical rainy season in Perú and Ecuador. Just like the growing humanitarian crisis due to the disruptive effects of climate change, this incident too was blamed on the destructive cocktail of the effects of the Anthropocene and the lack of investment by the state, which are felt most keenly at the margins of the Global South—“slow violence,” as Rob Nixon puts it.
Malqui Machay was uncovered in 2010 and is hypothesized to be the tomb of Atahualpa, only to be forgotten by the institutions in charge of its preservation since 2015, when it was designated as a heritage site. The case of neglect at Malqui Machay was widely broadcast, most probably because of its presumed use, but it is just a small example of a long-lasting and widespread neglect of Indigenous heritage. The fate of this site is the same as other sites of historical interest, some of which are officially recognized in national heritage listings or in archeological reports.
Environmental catastrophes are not the only threat to such sites; the ever-growing local desire for (urban) development is deliberately erasing traces of ancient, designed landscapes. This essay introduces an (incomplete) account of pre-Columbian sacred markers in the North Andean region of Ecuador, targeted by colonial plunderers for their content, obliterated and desecrated by modern development, and exceptionally preserved as Indigenous heritage.
In another recent case, the Movimiento de Protección Pucará de Chaquibamba—an organization comprising cultural and ecological activists, archaeologists, and members of the Santo Domingo de Sevilla community—has been demanding the protection of the spatial markers of pre-Incan occupation, including tolas (artificial mounds) and a partially destroyed pucará (fortress) that was leveled to make room for a soccer field and private plots for the locals after subdivision of land in the Chaquibamba archaeological site. The Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) officially supports the preservation of this marginalized site, which is related to the heritage of the Kitu Kara nation. In some cases, the reclamation of archeological sites has been a partially successful strategy for the Indigenous movement not only to preserve but to question and reposition Indigenous history within the nation-state’s narratives of heritage, which historically have deemed Indigeneity as an essential but lesser component of Hispanic mestizaje.
One such example of Indigenous reclamation of national heritage is the Puntiatzil archaeological site (also called Puntiachil and Puntyatzil). Puntiatzil, built between 1436 and 1670, is mainly known for its platform: the frustum of a monumental truncated pyramid. The site also includes smaller rectangular and hemispherical mounds, most of which are in ruins (Figure 1). Puntiatzil is surrounded by small two-story buildings and located in the east side of the city of Cayambe, Ecuador, where the urban fabric expands towards the slopes of Cayambe Volcano. The site was reclaimed in the 1990s by the Ecuadorian Indigenous movement.
Puntiatzil was chosen in 1991 in the context of the Indigenous movement’s reclamation as a site for celebrating Indigenous rituals hitherto syncretized in Christianized festivities (Figure 2). The pyramidal mound had already begun to be used even before 2001 when it was expropriated and officially demarcated as heritage site. Supporters of the Indigenous movement were one among several parties claiming the property where Puntiatzil was located. The first celebrations of 1991 at Puntiatzil were supported by a set of private stakeholders, while another group opposed Indigenous occupation, declaring Puntiatzil as agricultural land. Just one year earlier, CONAIE had gained official recognition following the great Indigenous uprising of June 1990. In its official set of petitions to the state, CONAIE had demanded the creation of policies to “protect and develop” archaeological sites. Since then, Puntiatzil has been continuously used to highlight the political visibility of Indigenous nations. Yearly pan-Andean rituals—raymikuna—related to the temporal markers of equinoxes and solstices are celebrated here by communities around Cayambe.
Figure 1. Puntiatzil pyramid in Cayambe, Ecuador. Photo by author, August 2025.
Figure 2. Poster for the first Inti Raymi at Puntiatzil that reads: “for the recuperation of our culture, let us all go to dance to Puntyatzil temple– Cayambe, June 29, 1991.” CICAY-Pedro Pablo Guaña Archive.
Puntiatzil is a tola, which according to Barbacoan etymologies means an artificial mound. Tola is a common toponym for neighborhoods, streets, stadiums, stores, or entire parishes in Ecuador, especially in the northern provinces of Esmeraldas, Pichincha and Imbabura. Tola Chica, Tola Grande, La Tolita, La Tola, or Las Tolas are common iterations that might refer to preexisting tolas. But tolas are archaeological evidence of pre-Columbian occupation generally containing burials, which according to archaeologists María Fernanda Ugalde and Cristóbal Landázuri can be classified as hemispherical (the smaller and most common type), truncated pyramids, where the frustum was a plinth for Caciques’ (local elites) houses, and truncated pyramids with 100 to 200 meters long ramps, where the frustum was used for cooking, eating and drinking in massive reciprocal rituals. The Puntiatzil pyramid belongs to this third type, similar to those nearby Zuleta , Cochasquí, or Intag, to just name a few (Figure 3).
Before the sixteenth-century relocation of indigenous communities for exploitation by the Spaniards in the Andes, tolas were situated within the highly artificially modified landscape of wetlands in the northern Andean region and a network of sacred landmarks. In this context, tolas are traces of a pre-Columbian monumental acknowledgment of death and served as the sites for communal rituals as mediators among humans, the environment and the divine.
Tolas were ubiquitous in the Northern Andean region of Ecuador, in what archaeologists generally call the Caranqui and Yumbo cultures, which thrived between the tenth and sixteenth centuries (Figure 4). The omnipresence of tolas in this region was registered, for example, in the chapter “Monumentos de la Jurisdicción de Quito de los Antiguos Indios” of Relación histórica del viaje a la América Meridional by Spanish military scientists Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa—published after the 1735 French Geodesic mission led by Charles Marie de la Condamine. In this account, they described tolas as part of a collection of “superb ruins” of “Indians” that reflected “their extreme passion for rendering their burial places remarkable,” shaping them to emulate mountains (Figure 5).
Figure 3. A semi-destroyed pyramidal tola by huaqueros at Cochasquí in 1933 as found and published by German archaeologist Max Uhle in “Las Ruinas de Cochasquí.” Boletín de La Academia Nacional de Historia XVIII, no. 54 (1939).
Figure 4. Map with Yumbo and Caranqui tola sites extension in the northern Ecuadorian Andes. Drawn by the author from Ronald D. Lipi, “Las Tolas (Montículos Artificiales) Ecuatorianas Como Iconos Sagrados: Una Perspectiva Panamericana,” in Simbolismo y Ritual En Los Andes Septentrionales, edited by Mercedes Guinea, Abya Yala, 2004, 113.
Figure 5. Depiction of monuments around the city of Cayambe, where figures B represent tolas. Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, Relación histórica del viaje a la América Meridional, Antonio Marín, 1748, 626, http://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?pid=d-1678031.
According to Ulloa and Juan, the difference in tola sizes was indicative of the social hierarchy of the burials. They imagined the tolas as indices of wealth: bigger tolas for the affluent and smaller ones for modest individuals who did not have vassals to help build a bigger mound. In this same chapter, they acknowledged the practice of treasure hunting in burial sites, which often contained offerings of golden human figurines, to satisfy the “curiosity or avarice of the Spaniards now inhabiting the country”–also known as “huaqueros” (which derives from the Quechua huaca that means sacred place or object). Ulloa and Juan proceeded to give detailed instructions (that included a plan and elevation) for digging up tolas, abstracting (and further promoting) avarice by representing the content of excavated tolas (Figure 6).
The desecration of burial sites - performed as an extension of an all-encompassing extractivist attitude towards indigenous objects and monuments, which were praised while being plundered and destroyed, was an ongoing process in the “infinite number of huacas” that Ulloa and Juan witnessed especially in Cayambe area, where Puntiatzil is located. The excavations of ancient burials were so overwhelming—and sacred objects so disdained—that Ulloa and Juan described that gold burial artifacts were routinely found at the colonial revenue office ready to be sent to Spain as part of the royal fifth.
Despite their continuous depletion since the sixteenth century, archeologist John Stephen Athens listed as many as 67 sites with 864 tolas after surveying the area for over 30 years. Notably, this is not an exhaustive inventory, the numbers keep changing as mounds initially thought to be natural hillocks are being recognized as tolas, while many sites registered since 1970 by Athens have been destroyed. Architectural or agricultural developments are not fazed by the prospect of razing these artificial earth mounds; rather, they treat tolas like any other topographical feature. Tolas exist in a land ruled by capitalist exchange and fungibility has replaced sacredness. On rare occasions, tolas have been used as modern ritual spaces, like those around Lago San Pablo in Otavalo that would be rented at least until the mid-twentieth century for syncretic rituals (Figure 7). These sites have been continuously menaced by desecration since the sixteenth century, not only by greedy huaqueros and developers, but also by those seeking to override pre-Columbian beliefs through building Christian temples on top of or near them (Figure 8 and 9).
Figure 6. Depiction of typical burial offerings in Cayambe. Objects are enlarged in relation to a tola in figures A and B in the same engraving. Figure B shows a plan with excavated tunnels, and Figure A shows the elevation. Antonio de Ulloa and Jorge Juan, Relación histórica del viaje a la América Meridional, Antonio Marín, 1747, 624, http://bdh-rd.bhttp://bdh-rd.bne.es/viewer.vm?pid=d-1678031e.es/viewer.vm?pid=d-1678031.
Figure 7. A ritual festivity on an earth mound, most probably a tola, in the late eighteenth century at San Pablo Lake, Ecuador. The painting captures the alignment of the ritualized earth-mound with the sacred lake, and the sacred mountains, Rey Loma and Mama (mother) Cotacachi. Attributed to Rafael Troya, “Fiesta en el Lago San Pablo,” in Xavier Puig Peñalosa, Rafael Troya: estética y pintura de paisaje, (UTPL, 2015), 98-99.
“Tolas are traces of a pre-Columbian monumental acknowledgment of death and served as the sites for communal rituals as mediators among humans, the environment and the divine.”
Figure 8. Fragment of a 1783 land trial map (called “Vista de Ojos”). The map shows a tola next to the Christian temple at Imantag Indigenous settlement, located on the Cotacachi volcano’s side. Archivo Nacional del Ecuador, ANH.SG.IND. Caja 96, exp.4, p.123.
Figure 9. The Cathedral of Lourdes in San Pablo Lake. The picture shows the pre-Columbian tola as a plinth for the Christian temple alongside an Indigenous cemetery and Tayta (father) Imbabura volcano in the background. “Memoria fotográfica del estado actual de la capilla de Lourdes en San Pablo del Lago,” Biblioteca MCYP Sede Quito.
The meaning of tolas as part of a ritualized landscape must have been clear to the indigenous laborers who worked for Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, largely considered to be the father of Ecuadorian archaeology. Between 1909 and 1911, Jijón y Caamaño located and excavated artificial mounds in Urcuquí (Ibarra) and El Quinche (Quito). Accompanied by some 60 indigenous workers, he excavated pre-Columbian burial sites in hemispherical tolas and vertical pit tombs. The violence against the bonded Indigenous labor that continued here after independence from Spain was doubly distressing: Indigenous indentured servants were forced to dig in places still haunted by ancient spirits. At the time of the Jijón y Caamaño survey, some Indigenous houses were still built on top of tola mounds (continuing the Cacique’s consecrated household), and some tolas displayed evidence of tullpa-rumy, a stone bonfire for rituals and cooking in Quichua. The attempts to study tolas (where excavations sometimes ended in total demolition) resulted in Jijón y Caamaño’s rich, detailed account about their content (consisting of human remains, pottery, and miniature human figures) and the Indigenous cosmologies that still operated through them.
Jijón y Caamaño highlighted pyramidal earth mounds with ramps as the greatest exemplars of tolas. He described the Puntiatzil site by its location in the east of Cayambe, but without naming it. He praised the site as having a “magnificent rectangular terrace." Jijón y Caamaño did not give more details about Puntiatzil, but he published photographs and drawings of other pyramidal tolas, even though he did not excavate them. Some tolas included in Jijón y Caamaño’s publication are still identifiable, such as Pailatola or Orozcotolas in the city of Atuntaqui. The first one had a ramp at the time Jijón y Caamaño documented it, which is now demolished (Figure 10). At the Orozcotolas site, one of the tolas is currently occupied by the Andrade Marín Cemetery (Figure 11). Orozcotolas and Pailatola are part of the official Ecuador’s archaeological heritage and have been recognized between 2015 and 2018, arguably based on Jijón y Caamaño’s survey demarcating their limits.
Figure 10. Plan and Section of Pailatola in Atuntaqui. Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, Contribución al Conocimiento de los Aborígenes de la Provincia de Imbabura, (Blass y Cia., 1912).
Figure 11. Plan and Section of Orozcotolas in Atuntaqui. Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, Contribución al Conocimiento de los Aborígenes de la Provincia de Imbabura, (Blass y Cia., 1912).
In this sense, Puntiatzil is an exception: it has been brought under preservation even though it was not properly documented in Jijón and Caamaño’s survey. More than Jijón y Caamaño’s archaeological recognition, it was the occupation of Puntiatzil since 1991 that stopped the slow but sustained process of destruction of the site: the infill from the mound was being used in a couple of nearby small adobe brick houses and artisanal brickworks. Indeed, many monumental tolas in the Caranqui region have been lost because allegedly their soil composition is particularly suitable for producing bricks.
Puntiatzil attests to a struggle against private land ownership and extraction that disregards non-monetary values–especially those of Indigenous origin. Puntiatzil’s preservation has disrupted the relentless urbanization and unavoidable topographical modification that commonly erases tolas. What would have happened to Puntiatzil is arguably showcased in the Pisanqui hacienda (agricultural estate). The Pisanqui site is just one of many examples with rounded and pyramidal tolas registered by Athens in the 1970s. In the aftermath of state-promoted land reforms and colonization processes, which began in 1964, interventions such as private construction, agricultural plots, highways, or power transmission lines have partially or totally flattened its earth mounds (Figure 12 and 13).
In recent efforts to portray the obliteration of pre-Columbian architecture under the passive gaze of local communities and the government, researchers of pre-Columbian astronomy have pointed at a bisected tola at the Pisanquí site, condemning its current use as the plinth for a modern building that does not fit with their hypothesis of the tola as a space for astronomic measurements (Figure 14).
This tola at Pisanquí shows a paradoxical compromise at the intersection of several layers of modern infrastructure that partially destroyed it. This ruined pyramid was already partially destroyed by a crossing highway when Athens depicted the Pisanquí site in 1973. Currently, a concrete wall prevents the mound—and the house on top of it—from collapsing over the highway. The house’s emplacement seems to recognize the geometry of the tola’s original frustum, as its squared centralized composition aligns perpendicularly to the diagonals of the platform. This tola is a sort of infrastructural graft, a node where a highway, a house, and a power line intersect. The incomplete destruction of the ancient monument shows the ongoing (but here strangely halted) developmental forces that unceremoniously obliterate thick layers of ancient occupation of this region. Is the “value" of modern infrastructure, intertwined and dependent on the mound, what kept developers from further flattening of the tola? Or was a belated consideration of its sacredness what avoided further destruction?
Figure 12. Tolas at Pisanquí hacienda mapped by John Stephen Athens in 1973 in “Monumentos Karankis: Una Historia a Punto de Desaparecer,” Boletín de La Academia Nacional de Historia CI, no. 210 (December 2023): 45–78.
Figure 13. Contemporary parcellation at Pisanquí hacienda. Google Earth 2024.
Figure 14. A bisected tola on the Otavalo-Cochasquí highway. It features a building and a high-voltage tower on top. Google Street View.
Figure 15. Preparation for the Indigenous movement led Inti Raymi at the platform of Puntiatzil in Cayambe, Ecuador, on June 21, 2018. Photo by Eduardo Santillán.
In the way they are used and (discursively) contested, the ancient meaning of tolas—an index of a remote notion of sacredness that we are unable to fully grasp—has unsettled colonizers and still bothers preservationists. Centuries of neglect, rejection, and essentialization of pre-Columbian architectural remains have been counterweighted by the contemporary care of archaeology. The preservation of Indigenous heritage has been ineffectively granted by the state as a cultural matter, failing to meet the Indigenous movement’s reclamation of 1990. Despite particular efforts for preserving pre-Columbian traces, the calls for purity and essentialization seem to contribute to further negating, erasing, and selecting only the most significant mounds. How would an archeology of today work with different layers of meaningfulness, like tolas as plinths for political, funerary, habitational, or infrastructural uses? How could marginalized pasts avoid essentialization and the attempts to flatten their ritual (and political) forms and contents?
Citation
Marco Salazar Valle, “Tolas in the Northern Andes: Plinths for Contesting Meanings,” PLATFORM, September 15, 2025.
