In between the Sites: Understanding Late Holocene Manteño Agricultural Contexts in the Chongón-Colonche Mountains of Coastal Ecuador through UAV-Lidar and Excavation.

Mapping the terrain surrounding concentrations of documented Manteño (ca. a.d. 650–1700) stone architecture within 1.2 km² of the cloud forests of Bola de Oro in southern Manabí, Ecuador using an Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based lidar Mobile Mapping System (MMS) revealed a modified landscape of agricultural systems. The resulting Digital Terrain Models (DTMs), subsequent ground-truthing, and excavation show a modified Manteño landscape of agricultural terraces, drainage channels, and water retention ponds tailored to the storage and distribution of water brought by seasonal rains and by marine layers precipitating at these higher elevations. Such a massive human investment in this challenging landscape was most likely a result of the Chongón-Colonche Mountains being the most resistant environments to the extreme climate changes brought by El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) during the climatic shifts of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA, ca. a.d. 950–1250) and the Little Ice Age (LIA, ca. a.d. 1400–1700). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]