This book is a surprise. I originally assembled the information presented here as background for a study of the contemporary indigenous costume of highland Ecuador, done in collaboration with Lynn A. Meisch and Laura M. Miller and based primarily on their fieldwork during the 1980s. It did not take me long to realize, however, that a new synthesis of the material was required in order to make even the simplest statements. For example, it seemed necessary to summarize the history of Ecuador's

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... igenous peoples to provide the context for a discussion of their costume. Yet the state of the available literature was such that a useful summary could not be done by any one of us whose work had been mainly ethnographic. Therefore, I requested manuscripts from archaeologists and historians who were more familiar with the resources available in these areas. In addition, the amount of evidence available on historical costume proved to be more plentiful than I had anticipated. The result was that I eventually realized that instead of an introduction to our work on contemporary costume, I had a whole separate book. Because of pressure to produce an exhibition and the importance of publishing field data, the material on contemporary costume was prepared and appeared first, in Costume and Identity in Highland Ecuador, edited by Ann Pollard Rowe (The Textile Museum, Washington, DC, and University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1998), and an exhibition was held at The Textile Museum in 1999. Some reference is made in the 1998 book to the more detailed background information here, but it was certainly not my intention that it would take so long to publish. In the difficult task of dividing the costume information, the basic criterion I used was to include data collected in our 1980s fieldwork in the earlier book, and to hold the material gleaned from published sources and museum collections for the present volume. Since some of our fieldwork included in-