What we know about the people who constructed sambaquis is almost wholly derived from these specialized sites linked with burial. The shell mounds provide direct information on technology and subsistence but also offer bases for reconstructing the builders’ societies.
The mortuary program that resulted in mound building must have played a decisive role in societal structure and dynamics. The nature of feasting has great potential for disclosing cultural characteristics and social relationships (Dietler and Hayden 2001). Furthermore, mortuary observances are privileged arenas for displaying political or prestige power and negotiating or reinforcing solidarity and cooperation. The prolific consumption and discard of food around individual burials and throughout a funerary area suggests that the affinity group interring their dead invited the participation of a larger social network in mortuary ceremonies. They expended surpluses to maintain and expand connections or to negotiate and regulate power and prestige, thus promoting interactions and integration of a broader regional scope.
Formalized systems of social inequality are not apparent in mortuary treatments. Funerary areas are collective and isolated burials are few. Distinctions that might relate to social categories or status are infrequent rather than regularly encountered, but include a painted clay covering placed over a body, shell deposited over an occasional individual grave as well as over whole funerary areas, and much greater than usual volumes of shell mounded over particular funerary areas. A few recorded instances of rare stone effigies as burial accompaniments are potentially a potent form of differentiation. The probable religious connotation of zooliths and their restriction to individual burials in a few sambaquis likely signifies the emergence of ritual power, exercised within the framework of ideology and territoriality underlying mortuary ritual and funerary landmarks.
Broadly shared similarities in sambaqui bone, shell, and lithic industries, as well as building processes have been interpreted as the outcome of interactions all along Brazil’s coast, probably based on common linguistic and social grounds (Gaspar 1991, 1998). Evidence for another aspect of such a pan-regional network comes from the stylistic and ideological implications of zooliths and related stone objects. They are made in an elegant, schematic, and homogeneous style over a distance of around 2,000 km from the Cananeia/Iguape region southwards to Uruguay, always in association with coastal sam-baquis or cerritos (Prous 1977).
The frequent precision in depicting recognizable species morphology (Figures 18.4, 18.5) could be described as “hyper-realistic,” and is evocative of iconographic and symbolic meaning. Zooliths include effigies of land and sea species such as whales, dolphins, sharks, penguins, turtles, bats, felines, armadillos, eagles, other varied birds and fish and, very occasionally, humans. As representations of entities belonging simultaneously to the material and spiritual worlds, zooliths may represent ancestors, founders, mythical culture heroes, or even deities of a shared cosmology. In the context of other broadly shared sambaqui patterns, their standardized style is commensurate with the emergence of a pan-regional ideology and adds to the impression of a unique and unified cultural expression along the entire southern coast.
Ideological principles appear to have permeated sambaqui culture. Constantly reenacted in funerary rituals involving the offering and consumption of abundant food, these precepts would have been decisive in structuring sambaqui societies and in the development of economic and social complexity without the emergence of explicit mechanisms for rank and hierarchy. Where shell mound distributions have been mapped and initially dated, it is possible to detect territorial configurations among contemporary sambaquis. Spatial and demographic parameters not only would have promoted sedentism but also, given the long duration of regional occupations, the emergence of increasingly complex systems of communal production and social relationships.
Figure 18.4. Zooliths from Santa Catarina. (Maria Dulce Caspar)
Ceremonialism in funerary areas, involving the larger networks of affinity groups, also fits this interpretation.
Huge shell mounds were unequivocal landmarks, visible over long distances from land or water. The imposing mass of sambaquis imparted a similar obtrusive quality to the enclosed ancestors or founders, making them a constant presence in surrounding communities and reaffirming territorial rights grounded in these predecessors. Funerary monuments encoded a symbolic lexicon shared by fishing communities all along the Brazilian coast. Their construction embodied the ideological foundations of sambaqui societies that endured for millennia until the arrival of agriculturalists.
Figure 18.5. Zooliths from Santa Catarina. (Maria Dulce Caspar)
World History
