The person, the body and the history: Funerary archaeology in amazonian shellmounds.

• Grant number: 25/09617-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: September 01, 2025
• End date: March 31, 2029
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Archeology - Prehistoric Archaeology
• Principal Investigator: Eduardo Góes Neves
• Grantee: Eduardo Rosa de Mendonça Costa
• Host Institution: Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia (MAE). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 19/07794-9 - Human-environment relationships in Pre-Columbian Amazonia, AP.TEM

Abstract

In Southwestern Amazonia and the Lower Amazon, material culture is present almost continuously throughout the Holocene. These two regions comprise rich sources of information about the human past, including sites that are fundamental for our understanding of the region's occupation and the emergence of different cultural characteristics in Amazonia.Funerary archaeology holds great potential to study past human populations. The relationships of societies and individuals with the inevitable phenomenon of death can provoke reflections of and insights into how different populations understand the world, live their lives, and act on their environments.Therefore, this research aims to understand the deep Indigenous history of these regions via the study of the mortuary practices in these societies, with the objective of comprehending their cultures, lives, and relations with the death in the Amazon. This field remains poorly explored, and this project aims to fill these gaps to better understand the funerary practices of past Amazonian shellmound builders by employing the methodologies of archaeotanatology (archaeology of death), which will be applied in the analysis of these funerary structures and their burials. Funerary contexts in two shellmounds, Monte Castelo located in Southwest Amazonia, and Munguba, located in the Lower Amazon, will be studied. These sites were chosen due to the broad, multidisciplinary research being carried out at both sites by researchers from the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at the Universidade de São Paulo, and by the University of the West of Pará (UFOPA), respectively. (AU)