The pottery of the indigenous people of the upper Amazon, including the Kichwa people of Ecuador, is used in everyday life but also plays a part in the imaginative and ritual life of the community.

Unusual figurative forms emerge from the rich spirit world inhabiting the minds of the makers. Puyo, on the upper Amazon, is a center of the folk craft movement, which was encouraged by American anthropologists Norman and Dorothea Whitten and by ceramists Richard Burkett and Joe Molinaro.

Since the 1990s, Esthela Dagua and her daughter, Miriam Vargas, have enjoyed a growing reputation and visited the United States several times to perform demonstrations. Kichwa potters make a stunning variety of surreal forms, including the Huri-Huri, an underworld spirit with a mouth at the back of his head to eat humans. The Puyo Supay or Puyo Spirit, a whimsical cloud figure, plays both verbally and visually with Puyo, the name of a town that also means clouds in Kichwa.