BEYOND POTS AND PANS:

CERAMIC RECORD AND CONTEXT IN PRE-COLONIAL AMAZONIA

Paper presented at the 78th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology

4 April 2013, Honolulu, HI

CRISTIANA BARRETO

ARQUEOTROP (Laboratório de Arqueologia dos Trópicos) Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia

Universidade de São Paulo

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Introduction

Until the last century, most of what was known about pre-colonial Amazon came essentially

from ceramic analysis, including ceramic distribution, typologies, seriations and dating. Pots

and pans were the basic sources for organizing the still standing framework that accounts

for the history of diverse cultural occupation of this immense region. And thanks to ceramics

analysis we can today agree (or disagree) on a number of key elements which have been

elected to define cultural horizons, traditions, sub-phases and phases.

Today, settlement pattern data, the distribution and content of black earth, different

types of earth works (plazas, ditches, mounds and the so called geoglyphs) may say a lot

more about the different cultures that inhabited the Amazon than perhaps the temper used

in the pottery made by them.

In previous work (Barreto 2010), I have emphasized the need to go back to ceramics

and argued that ceramic complexes must be understood in a more dynamic mode. The

grammar of stylistic flow along the Amazon basin must be understood in its directions, but

also in the logics of replication, borrowing, emulation, and many other processes that can

be related to real social histories of population expansion, colonization of territories,

participation in networks, competition, warfare and other phenomena.

In this paper, I would like to go back to the ceramic record to propose a different

perspective on the way archaeologists can and should look at pottery in the Amazon. It

proposes a shift away from looking at ceramics as a record for us archaeologists, in the

sense of helping to build cultural histories and sequences, to, instead, look at ceramics as

documents and records for the people who lived in the Amazonian past.

This implies considering the different purposes and uses of ceramics by Amazonian

indigenous societies and looking at a series of contexts and qualities of these materials that

may tell us about making pottery as identity building, as communication and network

building, as the objectification of entities and as symbolic means of social reproduction.

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Ceramics as native documents

Anthropologists of Amazonian societies have always stressed the non-material character of

these cultures. They emphasize the invisible and the immaterial and, even when studying

material artifacts and visual expressions (feather work, basketry, masks, body painting) they

stress their ephemeral nature, as short-lived materials and visual things made for particular

moments, usually rituals, in which they have a short life span.

The immateriality and invisibility of Amazonian culture from an anthropological point

of view contrast radically with the density, materiality and visibility of ceramics in the

archaeological record of past Amazonian settlements.

What we see in the Amazonian past is a deliberate choice of investing huge amounts

of time and skill to produce and use very material, durable and visible artifacts, which they

knew well would survive for a long time, for generations to come, even if partial or

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fragmented. In other words, we find prolific amounts of ceramics not just because they are

one of the few materials able to survive in the archaeological record of moist tropical

contexts, but also and, essentially for this paper, because these societies produced, used

and discarded a large amount of ceramics in quantities and qualities that go well beyond

exclusively economic needs. This must tell us about special relationships of these people

with ceramics - this is what this paper is about.

Lessons from ethnography

When anthropologists do focus on the materiality of indigenous Amazonian culture (and

there has been a number of important contributions in this field lately), we see a number of

possibilities and implications for the interpretation of intentions behind the production of

ceramics.

1. Objects as embodied entities.

Most ethnographic groups understand artifacts as copies of elements from primordial

times; they are a replacement in the present of things that existed in the (mythological)

past. The work of Lucia van Velthem (Velthem 2003 ) has shown that among the Wayana,

for instance, the hammock reproduces, or constitutes, the web of the primordial spider; a

particular wooden stool embodies the king vulture; a round basked looks exactly like the

body of a coiled snake. But what artifacts replicate are not just the images, or the

appearance of things, but the capacity of these ancestral elements to act on the world. So

artifacts have or are an index to ancestrality and history.

2. An economy of materiality

There is an “economy” of materiality in which the combination of attributes such hardness,

durability, or capacity to produce sounds, colors and, of course, shape, are directly related

to the intensity of their agency and power as true “entities”. Objects can embody capacities

to do things, good and bad, and may even have their own perspectives about other entities

that depend on a combination of physical and visual attributes. In the Upper Xingu, for

instance, people avoid making hard and durable musical instruments with jaguar skin

decoration, because it would be so powerful that it would be too dangerous. Sometimes

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breaking, burying and burning artifacts are required to end an object’s power of agency

(Barcelos Neto 2012).

3. Display of imagery

There are a number of objects that are made to be seen, but also display imagery as a “tool”

to make people see other things, especially in the case of shamanistic rituals. The work of

Els Lagrou among the Kaxinawá, that has also been applied to many other ethnographic

contexts in the Amazon, suggests a distinction between what she call “drawings” and

“images”. Images are indexes which synthetize and help people access other universes

(ancestral, mythological or spiritual) and can be two or three dimensional (Lagrou, 2007).

How can we explore the implications of such regimes of materiality for

understanding the relationship between people and ceramics in archaeological contexts in

the Amazon? Here I provide examples of three different contexts in which we can read

ceramics in this different way, examples that may give us hints on how we can further

explore these issues. I present them in chronological order:

Recurrent features of buried ceramics in Formative sites (Pocó phase sites in the

Lower Amazon region of the Trombetas river),

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Uses of ceramic figurines in the Lower Amazon (decapitation as termination of

agency),

Funerary ceramics in the Amazon estuary .

Memory pits

The first example is what I call, in a very informal way, memory pits. Basically these are

features that we have been finding repeatedly in formative sites both in Central and Lower

Amazon, especially in contexts of Formative ceramic sites which have been later been re-

occupied by either Polychrome Tradition or Incised-Punctuated archaeological cultures.

These memory pits appear in ceramic sites, sometimes without an entire soil matrix

of black earth (Terra Preta de Indio), or Terra Preta in a layer that is not very thick. Instead,

memory pits can be distinguished as localized pits of black earth, often about a meter deep

and two to three meters wide, containing considerable amounts of charcoal and ceramic

shards.

What may appear, upon first impression, as simply trash pits with burned organic

remains, reveals further characteristics once we look at the ceramic shards. Upon

examination of the shards, one realizes that not only there seems to have been a selection

of fragments with important decoration information (rims with modeled appendages,

fragments with incised and painted patterns, representing the variety of decoration types in

the ceramic complexes of these cultures), but also that these fragments seem to have been

carefully placed in a cavity in order to be intentionally buried and burnt.

The site of Cipoal do Araticum excavated by Vera Guapindaia from Museu Paraense

Emílio Goeldi, in the Trombetas river is a good example of these intentional burials of

ceramics. It is a multi-componential site, with an ancient Pocó occupation dating from

around 2.300 year BP, followed by a Konduri phase occupation (Incised Punctate Tradition)

much more recent, with dates ranging from 1000 to 500 years ago (Guapindaia 2008,

Guapindaia and Lopes 2011).

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Eduardo Neves (2012) and his team also mention such features in the Açutuba

phase, Hatahara site, in the Central Amazon, and Costa (2012) reports a similar context in

the Boa Esperança site near Tefé, both with materials which correlates chronologically and

stylistically to the Pocó phase in the lower Amazon (Neves 2012). In the Santarém area, the

Aldeia site also displays such features (Gomes 2011).

Because these features always appear in multi-componential sites, it is not clear

whether intentional burials of ceramics were practiced by the very same people who

produced them, as perhaps some sort of “memory archive” or “identity marking”of

territories, or by people who reoccupied these sites, as some sort of terrain “cleaning” and

termination of power of objects produced by others. The implications of both can only make

us realize that further research about these contexts of buried ceramics can give us a better

idea of pan-Amazonic meanings for ceramic objects and how people related to them in the

past.

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Figurines life cycles

The second example is related to the uses and discard patterns of ceramic figurines from the

Marajoara phase (Polychrome Tradition) dating from 400 to 1400 AD. These are well known

phallic and human shaped figurines described and studied by a number of archaeologists of

Marajó island, at the mouth of the Amazon (Roosevelt 1992, Schaan 2001). A number of

ethnographic examples from Northern South America tell us about the uses of figurines in

shamanistic rituals as virtual “little people” transformed into shamanic aids (Stahl 1986).

Although Marajoara figurines were also made to perform as rattles (a number of them are

hollow and have seeds or fragmented ceramics inside), there is not much contextual data

about them from excavations.

One critical piece of information is that many Marajoara figurines are found broken

at the neck, with either the head or the body missing, in the midst of regular trash midden.

Because the body and head, although broken, are never found together, it suggests the

hypothesis of an intentional decapitation practice of these images.

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In research on Marajoara pottery during the last years, and specifically about body

representation, I have worked with more than a hundred well preserved figurines. This

permitted the definition of breakage patterns and the correlation of these patterns with

different techniques of manufacture, style and shape. It is now clear that decapitation was

in fact intentional and not just a result of post depositional breaking at the neck (because

this would be a more fragile area). On the contrary, the walls of figurine necks proved to be

the thickest areas, while lateral perforations appear to have been made (not for hanging or

attaching them) but in order to help – or as a first step of – intentional head removal.

Decapitation and head hunting as war trophies are important themes in Amazonian

ethnography. Whether intentional head removal of figurines is related to practices of

power “termination” of ceramic shamanic entities, or of closing a life cycle of living,

powerful ceramic people-objects, or whether this practice has something to with

representation of war practices is uncertain. However, it does tell us about how ceramics

can embody real entities and have real life cycles to the people who produce and use them.

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We have also found that although figurines often combine phallic and human

shapes, X-ray analysis of whole figurines (those not decapitated) often display an external

human shape and, on the inside, extremely well finished phallic shapes, the latter only

observable in X-ray images.

Figurines are thus not only ceramics conceived as external surfaces or bodies for

entities rendered in a visual and material form. They also may conceal invisible attributes on

the inside that may, we suggest, be related to the essence of these entities. This is very

compatible with the duality and transformational, perspectivist ontologies being recorded

now in contemporary Amazonian societies.

Funerary urns

Perhaps the most compelling examples of how ceramics can embody entities in pre-colonial

Amazonia are the anthropomorphic funerary urns we find in two general styles across the

Amazon basin. I refer here to both the ceramic urns common in most Polychrome Tradition

sites that seem to contain (and represent) the remains of particular individuals and the

ceramic urns that are built as chimeras and transformational forms such as the large

Marajoara phase (Painted Joanes style) urns.

I have shown elsewhere (Barreto 2009) how these different styles reflect a diversity

of cultural ways to relate to ancestrality and forms of social leadership and power. What is

also important about funerary contexts is that these impersonated bodies not only

represent people or supernatural entities; they also function as true monuments in the

spatial organization of funerary rituals and cemeteries. They have a public communication

role of demarcating sacred territories, and synthesize, in their decorations or plastic shapes,

the identities of people and cultures who lived there for the other; be they contemporary

neighboring groups, or future generations of people who would come across their

territories.

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These examples from the Lower Amazon have important implications for the study of

ceramic styles in Central Amazon, where Eduardo Neves’ team has been working on the

wide geographical distribution and variability of the Guarita ceramic style from the

Polychrome Tradition.

The work of Eduardo Kazuo Tamanha (2012) who studied Guarita pottery from six

different sites on the Solimões revealed, in fact, a great technological diversity (not only in

paste, but also in the shapes of rims and lips). It seems to me that the wide distribution of

some particular shapes and decorations tell us more about patterns of replication of a visual

template, than a particular way of making pots.

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The study of Guarita iconography by Erêndira Oliveira, to ascertain if there is indeed

such a great diversity in the way images have been imprinted to these vessels shows that,

although they all have very similar visual appearances (with the repeating theme of the two

headed snake), there are a number of ways of making the grooving designs, different uses

of pigments and colors, and of different ways of composing them as for background colors

and depth of incisions. This tells us about ceramic templates being replicated by different

communities of potters, and that this sort of replication or emulation of certain visual

templates may be at the heart of network building strategies during the Polychrome

Tradition expansion.

Grooving decorative patterns on Guarita ceramics

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Conclusions

Since the first occupation of Amazonia by ceramic making peoples, we find an investment in

ceramic production which reflects choices of making durable objects for coming generations

that are extremely visible and able to act as media for all sorts of iconic and symbolic

imagery, sometimes with the clear intention of being recognized as such beyond the local

community in which they were made.

Patterns of ceramic use, life cycles of ceramic objects and practices of discarding and

termination involve a complex economy or management of ceramics. This paper suggests

that this can be recognized in the archaeological record and may often be similar to what

has been described in ethnographic contexts.

We have seen that use of ceramics to demarcate sacred places and territories could

have started very early on, in formative Barrancoid ceramics such as Pocó, and continues

through later funerary Polychrome Tradition sites in the Amazon estuary (in Caviana and

Marajó islands);

Since the work by Neves in Central Amazon, we can speak of ceramics as building

materials, especially in mound building. It is time now to move further and understand the

roles ceramics played as territorial markers, as ritual technologies, as distributed bodies, as

fractal monuments, as knowledge synthesis, as media and information flow for network

building, in sum, as ideological tools for reactualizing diverse cultural ontologies we find in

the Amazon until today.

Aknowledgements: FAPESP, Fundação de Amparo à pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo,

ARQUEOTROP, Laboratório de Arqueologia Tropical, Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia da

Universidade de São Paulo.

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