Why were bits of bone placed in this skullcap and buried? LEEH-USP

Death was a complicated business in prehistoric Brazil. Cadavers were meticulously dismembered and put on public display. Some parts seem to have been cooked and eaten, and then the bones were carefully tidied up and buried.

On at least one occasion, a skullcap became a convenient storage container for cooked and defleshed bones.

These intricate rituals offer a unique glimpse into the belief system of an ancient hunter-gatherer people, according to the international team of archaeologists investigating the burials – but other researchers caution about reading too much into the curious finds.


The hunter-gatherers who lived in central South America 10,000 or so years ago have traditionally been seen as simple people who were reluctant to embrace novelty.

But André Strauss at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, takes a different view. He and his colleagues have excavated burials at Lapa do Santo in east-central Brazil. They have found evidence that burial practices changed dramatically not once, but twice in just 2000 years.

The burials cast doubt on the idea that ancient Brazilians were simple people Andre Strauss

The first burials at the site, dating back 10,600 to 9700 years, were indeed simple: bodies were buried alone, in a fetal position. But by about 9600 years ago, funerary rituals had become far more complex and cryptic, with suggestions of delayed burial and the manipulation of remains.

One burial comprises just a decapitated head with two detached hands placed across the face. A roughly contemporary burial contains most of one skeleton – but, mysteriously, the middle sections of the lower leg bones had been chopped out and removed.

Other burials from this time contain little more than bundles of such “mid-shafts” from the limb bones of several bodies. Yet more burials contain mid-shafts that have been chopped into small pieces, burned and – judging by cut marks – stripped of their flesh.

This may indicate that community members ate the cooked meat. Afterwards, some of the bones were gathered up and placed inside a skullcap that was then buried.

By about 8600 years ago, practices had changed again. Burials became much simpler, reverting to putting just one body in each grave, but the burial pits are only about 50 centimetres in diameter, and the bones within them are crowded and jumbled. This suggests that dead bodies were left somewhere to rot before the bones were gathered and buried.

The study could lead to a reassessment of the region’s archaeology Mauricio de Paiva

Strauss thinks the changes – from simple burials to elaborate ones, and then back to relatively simple burials – may reflect pivotal events affecting the hunter-gatherers.

The switch to elaborate burials at 9600 years might be particularly significant, given that complex ritual is often seen as a way for communities to bolster social cohesion during difficult times.

“What we observe around this time is both a change in the raw material used for stone tools and an increase in the density of artefacts,” says Strauss. He says this might suggest that the population in the area grew suddenly 9600 years ago, perhaps through an influx of immigrants.

Ancient morticians

Strauss thinks all the elaborate burials between 9600 and 8600 years ago reflect various aspects of a single complex funerary practice. Bodies seem to have been treated elaborately in death, perhaps suggesting some people acted as “funerary attendants” – essentially morticians.

According to Strauss and his colleagues, these attendants appear to have divided up corpses into opposite parts: heads were treated differently from bodies, the middle parts of long bones were treated differently from the ends of the bones and so on.

This might indicate that the ancient hunter-gatherers had similar “dualistic” beliefs to those documented from much later South American civilisations. They may have viewed their world as a series of opposites – night and day, male and female, left and right – and this might have influenced their religious customs.

But David Chicoine at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge cautions against over-interpreting the evidence. “The excavation results are well presented and obviously significant, but the limited sample size has to be considered,” he says.

For instance, there are only two “simple” burials from the earliest period, so it isn’t clear how representative they are of funerary practices at that time.

Provocative claim

The suggestion that the bodies were treated by funerary attendants is particularly provocative and intriguing, says Chicoine, given that this sort of practice is typically associated with complex societies rather than generalised hunter-gatherer communities.

He says the team may need to build a stronger case for the existence of such morticians to convince other archaeologists.

Lawrence Owens at Birkbeck, University of London, says the burials raise more questions than they answer. He is particularly interested in a jawbone from one of the elaborate burials that has two neat holes drilled through it, suggesting it was once hung on a cord and worn. Many other early American populations wore bone jewellery too – although none are as ancient as the Brazilian burials.

Strauss hopes the research will lead to a reassessment of the region’s archaeology. The area has been extensively studied for about 170 years, and Strauss says these studies recorded the different burial practices, but no one thought to join the dots to build the full picture. “All these scholars were faced with the same evidence we described now, but they failed to recognise its importance,” he says.

Journal reference: Antiquity, DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2016.220

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