Acknowledgments

I would like to first thank the widow of Petronio Jaramillo Abarca; Xavier Alvarado; Mathias Spatz; Gerardo Peña Matheus; Carlos Peña Matheus; Roberto Perujo; Eduardo Mahuat; Mario Sánchez; and Omar Guevara for their help and understanding in my search, and for the support they gave me during my first expedition in Ecuador.

In Argentina, I would like to thank Micaela Goyén Aguado for all those years of communication and for the access she gave me to Juan Moricz’s materials in Buenos Aires.

Furthermore, I am grateful for the long, kind, and polemical conversations I had with Guillermo Aguirre and Debora Goldstern, on the phone and in person in Buenos Aires, before and after my expeditions.

A special mention for Javier Stagnaro; our friendship with Julio Goyén Aguado brought us close through the decades. And to Antonio “Tono” Huneeus for the recent finding and for our age-old connection to Ecuador and to the South American Andes.

I would like to thank the late Andrés Fernández Salvador Zaldumbide; Héctor Polit; Stanley Hall’s widow, Elaine Hall; Jorge Salvador Lara; the late Hernán Crespo; the late Gastón Fernández Borrero; the Sharupi family; Lucho Nivelo; Stan Grist; Jaime Rodriguez; the late Héctor Burgos Stone; Horacio Spotorno; the late Lilian Icaza; and Monica Williams.

I would also like to thank my wife at that particular time, Patricia, who was praying in my favorite spot at Saint James Parish, in Red Bank, New Jersey, before a beautiful and sober-looking statue of the Virgin Mary by a nineteenth-century Italian sculptor (she is shown treading on a snake with her left foot), right at the moment we were surrounded by a gang of renegade Shuars who came for our heads.