![]() Lawrence Owens at Birkbeck, University of London, says the burials raise more questions than they answer. He says the team may need to build a stronger case for the existence of such morticians to convince other archaeologists. 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. “The excavation results are well presented and obviously significant, but the limited sample size has to be considered,” he says.įor 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. 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.īut David Chicoine at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge cautions against over-interpreting the evidence. This might indicate that the ancient hunter-gatherers had similar “dualistic” beliefs to those documented from much later South American civilisations. Bodies seem to have been treated elaborately in death, perhaps suggesting some people acted as “funerary attendants” – essentially morticians.Īccording 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. Strauss thinks all the elaborate burials between 96 years ago reflect various aspects of a single complex funerary practice. ![]() He says this might suggest that the population in the area grew suddenly 9600 years ago, perhaps through an influx of immigrants. “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. 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. 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 study could lead to a reassessment of the region’s archaeology This suggests that dead bodies were left somewhere to rot before the bones were gathered and buried. 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. Afterwards, some of the bones were gathered up and placed inside a skullcap that was then buried.īy about 8600 years ago, practices had changed again. This may indicate that community members ate the cooked meat. Yet more burials contain mid-shafts that have been chopped into small pieces, burned and – judging by cut marks – stripped of their flesh. Other burials from this time contain little more than bundles of such “mid-shafts” from the limb bones of several bodies. 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. One burial comprises just a decapitated head with two detached hands placed across the face. 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. The first burials at the site, dating back 10,600 to 9700 years, were indeed simple: bodies were buried alone, in a fetal position. ![]() ![]() The burials cast doubt on the idea that ancient Brazilians were simple people
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