Abstract:
Up to the present, all rock art found in Ecuador consists of petroglyphs. The absence of documented rock paintingsmay be due to conservation conditions. Rock art sitesexist in three of the geographic regions – the coast, the Sierra (mountains) and the Amazon lowlands – and areonly missing on the Galapagos islands. Nevertheless,reports on these cultural heritage sites are scarce. A publication by Pedro Porras (1985) on the petroglyphs of Napo province in the northern Amazonian region is still considered an important reference on rock art in Ecuador.Regarding research in the years 2010-2014, only three projects have been published, two of them by the author(Ugalde 2011a, 2011b) which concern petroglyphs inAmazonia; and one by González and collaborators(2014) which provides a summary of petroglyphs inLoja province, in the southern region of the country,that were partially published on earlier occasions andwere presented in a previous volume of this series(González 2008). However, some unpublished reportson other research carried out during the last few yearsshow a growing interest in this cultural heritage by the State and local administrations which provided fundingfor rock art recording projects (Bravo and Vargas 2011;Constantine 2014), as well as by archaeology studentswho devoted their theses to rock art (López 2009; Granja2014; Mosquera 2014; Toscano 2014).
