By the time of Columbus, the people of Ecuador's tropical highlands had created small but remarkably complex and interlinked political societies. These small societies for many years proved able to fight off the overwhelming might of the Inca state. But around 1500 they fell to Inca invaders who, in turn, soon lost their dominion to Spanish warlords. Frank Salomon draws on large stores of previously unstudied sources to reconstruct the. political and economic institutions of pre-Inca societies that have gone unreported by chroniclers and undiscovered by historians. Their structure before and during the Inca interlude reveals unsuspected diversity in the Andean world. Salomon provides remarkable insight into the functioning of these 'chiefdoms', emphasising their importance for the understanding of rank, inequality, privilege, and central power in stateless societies. He also contributes to understanding of expansion, colonisation, and the adaptive relationships between indigenous and imposed regimes in a context of precapitalist statecraft.