Before There Were Roses: Environmental Conflict and the Double Conquest of the Ecuadorian Andes

This dissertation, “Before There Were Roses: Environmental Conflict and the Double Conquest of the Ecuadorian Andes,” explores the historical relationships between environmental change and evolving systems of labor at one of the oldest plantations in the Americas, a sixteenth-century hacienda in the Ecuadorian Andes known as Guachalá. Focusing on the pre-Columbian and early Spanish colonial periods, the study combines archival research with archaeological and environmental studies as well as digital-mapping methods to analyze four systems of environmental control at Guachalá. By showing how the back-to-back Incan and Spanish conquests disrupted poorly understood networks of kinship, exchange, and environmental reciprocity between the Kayambi and Karanki people of the northern Andes and the neighboring Quijos people of the upper Amazonian piedmont, I argue that colonization fueled experimentation with new forms of labor and triggered long-term processes of environmental change that challenge contemporary views of the Amazon as having played a minor role in this history. Finally, by examining the transition from Amazonian cotton to European wool in the late sixteenth century, this dissertation contributes new material and revises the terms of debate in environmental history regarding the immediate impacts and long-term consequences of Old-World ungulates in the Andes.