An Overview of Ancient Funerary Practices in Oriental Amazonia: A Regional Bioarchaeological Approach for Amapá, Brazil

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeology and ethnology have shown that the relationship between the living and the dead in Amerindian societies in Amazonia is a fundamental element for understanding their lifeways in the past and present. Archaeological research on funerary practices in the Amazon region has revealed a variety of body treatments and burial patterns over the last 2,000 years. In the coastal region of Amapá (Brazil), this diversity is evident in the human burials constructed across different landscapes, in natural or artificial monuments, with ceramics of different styles. The ongoing research aims to identify the spatial distribution and the patterns in archaeological human burials to provide a comprehensive overview of funerary practices in the region through the analysis of the deposition patterns of human skeletons at archaeological sites in three regions of Amapá: (1) Atlantic coast, (2) estuarine coast and the mouth of the Amazon River, and (3) southern inland. We excavated burial urns at the laboratory and analyzed the human remains and associated artifacts to provide an initial description and characterization. The data produced so far confirms that the pre-colonial cultural diversity in the region—often associated with the abundance of archaeological ceramics—is also observed in the funerary practices.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40319.0