Ryan Hechler

Ryan Hechler is in the Anthropology PhD program at Tulane University. He holds an Anthropology MA from McGill University and History and Art History dual BAs from Virginia Commonwealth University. He is a director and founder of the Proyecto Arqueológico Cochasquí-Mojanda in Ecuador’s northern highlands. Since 2016, he studies Cusco Quechua supported by the US Department of Education’s Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship. He is a Digital Scholarship Fellow of The University of Texas at Austin’s Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies and Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, where he coordinated a large-scale GIS project – “Toponymic Mapping of Ecuador’s Oriente Region: Bridging the Divide in Geographic Information Knowledge via Open-Access Geospatial Datasets.” He is a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad grant for his studies in Ecuador and is a forthcoming Visiting Researcher at the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin, Germany, where he will review their Max Uhle collection pertaining to Ecuador.

His doctoral research focuses on the development of late Pre-Columbian Barbacoan identity and complexity in Ecuador and transitional colonial experiences under the Inkas and Spanish via archaeology and ethnohistory. His principal site of archaeological investigation is Cochasquí, a monumental center defined by its large earthen pyramids and burial mounds. Additionally, he investigates late Pre-Columbian to Early Spanish Colonial transformations of Andean notions of difference and disability. 

Within his professional work in New Mexico, he studies the “non-Pueblo” world – understanding Pre-Columbian cultural developments of hunter-gatherer societies, their interregional relationships with Pueblo societies, and the subsequent impacts of the colonial Spanish, Mexican, and American governments on the Apache, particularly the Mescalero and Chiricahua societies.

Recent Publications

2021       “The Fourth Lifeway: Recognizing the Legacy of Bodily Difference and Disability within the Inka Empire.” Disability Studies Quarterly 41 (4): Special Issue: Indigeneity + Disability.

2021       “Over the Andes, and through Their Goods: Late Pre-Columbian Political Economic Relations in Northern Ecuador.” In The Archaeology of the Upper Amazon: Complexity and Interaction in the Andean Tropical Forest, edited by Ryan Clasby and Jason Nesbitt, 208-227. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

2020       “The Azotea Peak Ring Midden Survey: A Cultural Landscape of Subsistence and Feasting around the Azotea Mesa of the Permian Basin, Eddy Co., NM.” NewsMAC: Newsletter of the New Mexico Archeological Council 2020 (1): 16-19.