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The term "collapse" has become a widely used term that oversimplifies the intricate histories of human-environment interactions. It has contributed to the belief that civilizations in the Americas and the tropics could not endure over time. However, the Manteño civilization of the Ecuadorian coast challenges this notion. Flourishing for a thousand years (ca. 650–1700 CE), the Manteños inhabited the neotropics at the gates of one of the world's most influential climatic forces, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). To thrive, the Manteños needed to navigate the extremes of ENSO during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, ca. 950–1250 CE) and the Little Ice Age (LIA, ca. 1400–1700 CE) while capitalizing on ENSO's milder phases. This research uses change detection analysis of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) on Landsat satellite imagery under various ENSO conditions from 1986 to 2020 in southern Manabí, where the 16th-century Manteño territory of Salangome was situated. The findings indicate that the cloud forests found in the highest elevations of the Chongón-Colonche Mountains provide the most resilient environment in the region to adapt to a changing climate. Further investigations of the cloud forest of the Bola de Oro Mountain using Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV) equipped with LiDAR, ground-truthing, and excavation uncovered a landscape shaped by the Manteños., 2023, Includes bibliography., Degree granted: Dissertation (PhD)--Florida Atlantic University, 2023., Collection: FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The present study identifies settlement patterns of the Manteño culture within the cloud forest of southern Manabí by surveying, recording and analyzing the stone architecture found within the drainage basin of the Las Tusas River, Ecuador. The statistical methods used were: Triangulated Irregular Networks or TIN (for topography interpretations), K-means (to determine natural groups for structures based on their dimensions, shape, and wall thickness), Ripley’s K (to determine spatial nature of these groups) and Kernel Density (to visualize their spatial organization). The cloud forest ecotone of southern Manabí was an anthropogenic landscape during the late Integration period. The alluvial valleys of the upper Rio Blanco drainage basin do not represent a hinterland or a periphery occupation but a series of Manteño nucleated settlements raised on terraces and interconnected by strings of linear settlements and dispersed settlements throughout the rugged terrain of this landscape., 2018, Includes bibliography., Degree granted: Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018., Collection: FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection