Pasto

The Pasto were the most numerous indigenous people of the inter-Andean valleys of the Colombian department of Nariño and the neighboring province of Carchi in Ecuador, where they lived beside the Quillacinga. Their name may derive from an Awa phrase meaning scorpion people.

In the last decade of the fifteenth century they fought the Inca emperor Huayna Cápac, who campaigned against them from Quito. When Inca troops occupied Ipiales the Pasto withdrew into the western cordillera and drove the garrisons out, leaving the Incas to push through Cofán lands instead.

They were skilled cotton weavers and ran markets paid in gold and cloth; an inspection in 1558 found towns averaging close to five hundred families each. Their Barbacoan language, closely related to Awa Pit and marked by Quechua influence, gradually ceased to be spoken under colonial rule.