UA scientists uncover ancient Brazil cemetery

Two UA archaeologists and their students - more accustomed to digging the dirt of Arizona than the sand and shells of coastal Brazil - have returned from a six-week excavation of a prehistoric cemetery in South America.

The researchers were working along the coast of southeastern Brazil, where immense mounds of shells, some nearly 100 feet high, dot the countryside along the coast and inland lagoons.

Photo courtesy Paul and Suzanne Fish Art MacWilliams, anthropology graduate student, maps a trench during the 1997 field season. Archaeologists discovered fifty burials in the shell mound that year.

"We are primarily Southwestern archaeologists, this has been a good experience for us - very enriching," said Suzanne Fish, assistant curator of archaeology at the Arizona State Museum.

The mounds were built by little-known, stone-age people who lived in the area 2,000 to 6,000 years ago, fishing in the rich coastal waters and collecting shellfish along the shore. After the shellfish were eaten, the shells were used to build mounds in which to bury the dead, Fish said.

Recently, the mounds have been bulldozed and the shells used for cement. While an immense amount of archaeological data was destroyed, Fish and her husband Paul, curator of archaeology at the Arizona State Museum, have been able to use the destruction to learn more about the ancient people who built the mounds.

The two archaeologists chose a mound that had been nearly cut in half by heavy machinery, and spent the summer working with Brazilian archaeologists and three UA archaeology students, to clean the cut made by bulldozers in order to get a clear cross-section.

"We wanted to look at the evolution of the mound, how it formed," Suzanne Fish said. "We could get a lot of information without damaging it much further."

While American sponsors donated some money for the project, Brazilian universities and organizations footed most of the bill.

Photo courtesy Paul and Suzanne Fish Archaeologists from the University of Arizona and Brazil (below) study a cross-section of a giant mound of shells. The mound was used as a cemetery 2,000 to 3,000 years ago.

They found dozens of burials, all carefully cut into the mound and then covered with a layer of fresh shells. As successive layers were deposited, the mound grew to a height of over twenty feet and covered an area, the size of four football fields.

The archaeologists estimated more than 40,000 people could be buried in the mound.

"These shell mounds are helping us to understand that the lagoons were supporting fairly large populations," Suzanne Fish said.

She estimated about 1,500 people were buried in the mound every generation.

Other mounds may have been used at the same time, indicating that the coast could support a dense population even under primitive conditions. Even today, fishermen working in small boats are able to earn a middle-class income, purchasing cars and other consumer goods considered as luxuries by many Brazilians.

The burials contained simple objects such as shell ornaments and beads, and stone tools and axes. Individual graves or groups of graves were often separated by stockades of wooden posts, indicating some sort of social division such as family groups, Suzanne Fish said.

Burials in other mounds have contained more elaborate artifacts such as stone figurines of animals and stone scepters which may have been symbols of power, Paul Fish said.

The archaeologists will spend the next year analyzing and writing about their findings. Excavations may resume in the summer of 2001.