The Tsafiki Documentation Project will produce a comprehensive grammar and electronic lexical database of the Barbacoan language Tsafiki, spoken by the Tsachila people in the western lowlands of Ecuador. This project is a major step in the documentation of the western lowland cultures of South America, which are in general poorly documented. The electronic lexical database contains information on the language and endangered domains of cultural knowledge of interest to a wide range of scholars --linguists, particularly those interested in comparative studies; anthropologists, who will not only be interested in the documentation of the material culture but also on the extensive vocabulary concerning cosmology and philosophy; historians; botanists and zoologists; the Ecuadorian public in general and the Tsachila themselves. Because the lexical database and grammar will be based on a large corpus of already collected material, both works will be quite comprehensive. Finally, the project is highly collaborative. A trained team of members from the Tsachila organization PIKITSA will do much of the work themselves and all materials will be archived in the community as well as made available to the research community worldwide.
