Remembering Valdivia through a Unique Manteño Burial at Buen Suceso

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Burials have long been considered primary sources of information regarding social ranking and inequality, social understandings of ancestors, conceptions of death, diverse representations of identity and agency, and emotional expressions of mourning and loss (see Baitzel 2018; Buikstra and Nystrom 2015; Parker Pearson 1999). Thus, burials that stand out as different from the norm are often given special attention in the present as they were in the past. This paper presents an intriguing Manteño burial from Buen Suceso, Burial 10, which included the remains of a female young adult. Likely pregnant at the time of death, this individual was buried with a series of spondylus ornaments, green stones, and shell eye coverings, all materials evocative of watery environments. Radiocarbon dates between AD 771 and 953 associate this individual with Manteño and the artifacts buried with them were made only by Valdivia peoples. The elements of this burial including the special origins of the spondylus, artifacts associated with water, and the individual’s demographics indicate that this may have been a sacrifice focused on fertility potentially during a time of drought.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36864.0