A recent archaeological discovery in the municipality of Fonte Boa, in Amazonas, in the Médio Solimões region, promises to provide new insights into the way of life of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

Although it took place in a well-known archaeological site called Lago do Cochila [Cochila Lake], the find was random: the fall of a tree revealed seven ceramic funerary urns, two of which were very large. It is estimated that the artifacts are thousands of years old.

All the work involved, not just the discovery, but also the excavation and removal of the urns, was only possible thanks to the collaboration between archaeologists from the Pesquisa em Arqueologia e Gestão do Patrimônio Cultural da Amazônia do Instituto Mamirauá [Mamirauá Institute's Research Group in Archaeology and Management of the Amazon's Cultural Heritage], based in Tefé (AM), and members of the local communities, in particular the São Lázaro do Arumandubinha community.

After the tree fell, leaving its roots exposed, some community members saw the urns, but didn't take any notice of them. It was a pirarucu farmer who took the information to a priest, who in turn contacted archaeologist Márcio Amaral, from the Mamirauá Institute. From then on, the whole community was invited to take part in the process, in a thorough and meticulous process.

DISCOVERIES

Lago do Cochila is made up of a series of artificial islands, built by ancestral indigenous peoples to raise the land in wetlands and keep it dry even during periods of flooding, preserving their homes and activities. “It's a very sophisticated indigenous engineering technique, which shows territory management and a significant population density in the past,” explains Márcio Amaral.

The urns discovered revealed some unprecedented characteristics, compared to other funerary artifacts already discovered in the region. "The urns are large in size, with no apparent ceramic lids, which may indicate the use of organic materials for sealing, which have now decomposed. They were buried 40 centimeters deep, probably under old houses," says archaeologist Geórgea Holanda. Fragments of human bones, fish and chelonians were found inside the urns, indicating funerary rituals associated with food.

But these were just the researchers' first observations of the material. New insights will be uncovered with the analyses that will be carried out at the headquarters of the Mamirauá Institute, where the urns were transported in a major logistic effort, covering more than 190 kilometers in canoes, through streams and flooded areas.

Ceramics are a little-known tradition

Analyses of the recently discovered urns point to a new ceramic tradition in the region, different from the one commonly found in Central Amazonia, called the Tradição Polícroma da Amazônia [Amazonian Polychrome Tradition]. According to archaeologist Erêndira Oliveira, from the Emílio Goeldi Museum of Pará (MPEG), this tradition is a style that stands out for its multicolored painting. 

"Generally, they are ceramics painted in shades of red, brown and black on a white or light background, and which carry very sophisticated elements of decoration, mixing both painting and modeling practices. There are depictions of human faces, stylized animal bodies and intricate patterns of graphic arts, which probably had an intention, full of symbolic references, with imagery elements to attract the attention of observers. It was an art of enchantment. Perhaps that's why they attracted so much attention from travelers and chroniclers since the 16th century," she explains.

The urns found in Fonte Boa, on the other hand, indicate a little-known tradition in the region, with the use of a greenish clay, red bands and lures, which are dirt pastes applied externally to disguise the natural color of the ceramics. They are also larger urns than those of the polychrome tradition.

NETWORK

Erêndira Oliveira is a specialist in the Polychrome Tradition of the Amazon. For both her master's and doctoral degree, she studied the ceramics of Central Amazonia, in the area where the Negro and Solimões rivers meet. During her doctoral degree, she specifically researched the so-called “Tauary funerary urns”, found in 2014 in the community of the same name, near the Tefé River (AM), during the renovation of a school.

"This tradition dates from the 6th to the 18th centuries and is present in different regions of the Amazon Basin. It stands out for its wide regional dispersion, as it has been found in archaeological sites from the great rivers of the Peruvian, Ecuadorian and Colombian Amazon to areas close to the Amazon estuary in Brazil. This geographical distribution shows that there was a great deal of circulation and exchange of these ceramics and this style. Therefore, the peoples who produced these ceramics were probably integrated into networks of knowledge and political relations," says the researcher.

Each urn tells a story

Archaeologist Anne Py-Daniel, professor at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Pará (Ufopa), also studied the Tauary urns. After the excavation and transportation process, which was also carried out by community members and technical staff from the Mamirauá Institute, the urns were taken from Tefé to Ufopa's Curt Nimuendaju Archaeology Laboratory in Santarém, Pará. The analyses, carried out between 2019 and 2025, also involved the use of tomography to visualize the internal structures of urns that had not been fully excavated. 

After the laboratory analysis, the urns were returned in April this year to their territory of origin, in the municipality of Tefé. Along with the ceramics, the researchers took back the results of their studies to the community involved in the actions.
However, Professor Anne's work has expanded to several other archaeological sites and funerary urns, in addition to the Tauary: the Paredão urns, from the Hatahara archaeological site, in Iranduba (AM); the Caiambé urns, from Amanã Lake, at the confluence of the Solimões River with the Japurá River (AM); the urns from the Santarém region; and the Maracá urns, in Amapá.

"They're all very interesting. And each one tells us a different story. Although they are very common in the Amazon, they represent very great socio-cultural peculiarities. Some are entire burials, with the person buried directly. Others involve cremation and secondary burials [when the remains, such as bones, are reburied after a period of time]. Some urns, like the Maracá, apparently represent a person, reproducing the person's skin with their paintings, what they were supposed to look like in life. Other urns, like the Paredão, are huge and often have representations of animals or people, probably related to entities that are supposed to take the deceased to another path. The Marajoara urns also follow the same patterns such as representations that look like owls on the painted Joanes urns," says Anne.

Archaeology of death studies human societies

According to Professor Anne Py-Daniel, from Ufopa, Archaeology of Death is a perspective within archaeological science that investigates death, dying, people who die, the way in which people are cared for when they die, funeral practices and the places surrounding this moment of death. “The idea is to deal with death as an essential part of human societies, because it is something that unites us all: all human societies in the world have, at some point, developed tools to deal with the absence of loved ones,” she says.

Funerary practices and connections to life and death have been central themes in the studies of Erêndira Oliveira, from MPEG. "The funerary urns reveal that the ancient peoples of the Amazon had a profoundly symbolic relationship with death that connects with the worldviews of many indigenous peoples even today. Death was not understood as an absolute end, but as a process of transformation, of the body and of that person's identity. It is a moment of passage between different dimensions of existence, which requires a lot of care and meticulous rituals with the body, with the time of mourning and with the objects that accompanied the deceased person," she observes.

The archaeologist adds that this is why funerary ceramics were so carefully decorated with graphic art and symbols, with references to human and animal bodies. "These different elements were most likely connected to the cosmological systems of these peoples. Urns, for example, with human faces and limbs could portray not only the deceased person, but represent a new body and a new identity, a new skin that will accompany them in the process of transformation that begins with death. The images on the urns are not merely decorative, but active parts of this belief system, as for example in cosmological systems in which people can become birds, fish, jaguars," she analyzes.

Marajoara urns undergo restoration at Goeldi

After working on the Tauary urns, Erêndira is now studying Marajoara funerary urns, together with other MPEG researchers. "Approximately fifteen urns were found at the archaeological site of Açaituba, in the municipality of Anajás, in Marajó. It's basically a funerary site, a cemetery. These urns appeared precisely because of a period of extreme drought in 2023," he says.

The urns are currently undergoing a restoration process at the Goeldi Museum. "From our studies, we can say that these urns were used for secondary burial. What was buried in the urns were the bones, which may have been cremated or treated in different ways. We also know that, while the polychrome tradition is widely dispersed geographically, Marajoara ceramics are found only in the estuarine region of the Amazon. In addition, there are chronological differences, because the Marajoara is a little older than the polychrome," explains the archaeologist. According to Erêndira, Marajoara ceramic art was extremely refined and ended up becoming a symbol of Amazonian identity.

COMMUNITY

For Geórgea Holanda, from the Mamirauá Institute, one of the researchers involved in the recent discovery in Fonte Boa, it is not the researchers who have involved the communities in the archaeological research process, but the other way around. "We already have solid work carried out by the Archaeology Laboratory in the region and now people are calling us and taking part in the work with us. They are the ones who know the area, the paths, who take us to the archaeological site. We have our academic training and they have their Amazon training. We combine this knowledge and work together," she says.

For Anne Py-Daniel, archaeology was traditionally carried out by people far removed from the contexts in which the materials were found, but nowadays this has changed: "After a lot of reflection and demands from the communities, we realized that involving them is not optional, especially when we are working in their backyards and often talking about their past. The archaeologist doesn't own the archaeological material. In fact, nobody owns it. So we have to take responsibility and value the community's wishes in this process," she says.

INSTITUTIONAL PARTNERSHIP
The production of Liberal Amazon is one of the initiatives of the Technical Cooperation Agreement between the Liberal Group and the Federal University of Pará. The articles involving research from UFPA are revised by professionals from the academy. The translation of the content is also provided by the agreement, through the research project ET-Multi: Translation Studies: multifaces and multisemiotics.