Materiality of Amerindian Human Bodies in the Mouth of the Amazon River: Life and Death at the Curiaú Mirim I Site, Around the Second Millennium AD

Summary

This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

These paper aims to show an osteobiographical approach to read human bodies like a special kind of material culture which was inspired by the concepts of Amerindian ideas of construction of bodies and persons in the interpretation of the data analyzed. The Curiaú Mirim site is formed by funerary burials, ceremonial structures, which was dated by the 10th to 16th centuries AD associated to Mazagão, Marajoara, Koriabo and Caviana cultural complexes. In order to understand and characterize the funerary practices in that site, this study privileged human skeletal analysis to know how the persons was buried there and how funerary treatment was dispensed to them by the living mourners in the Ancient Amazon. It was possible to observe different kind of gestures in funerary/ceremonial depositions, as well as some osteobiographical inferences in the ways of life and burial practices interpreted in the light of ethnographical and ethnohistorical data concerning some Amerindian world views that allowed possible explanations of the cultural rules and cultural choices. There were seems to have been a continuity in the way of use of specific places that was spatially marked to bury the dead that indicates ancestor worship.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24543