Arco e flecha Tiriyó: levantamento e pesquisa nas Coleções Etnográficas do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi

Abstract

The Tiriyó are an indigenous group of the Carib family, whose other names are Piano, Pianokotó, Trio, Tarona, and Yawi. Their lands are located in the Tumucumaque and Acarai ranges on the border between Brazil and Suriname. The objective of this work is to survey the Tiriyó bows and arrows from the ethnographic collection of the Emílio Goeldi Museum of Pará in order to identify, classify, describe, and catalog these artifacts, seeking to standardize the existing documentation in the Curt Nimuendajú Technical Reserve based on the functional categories of Ribeiro's 1988 dictionary. We have identified 38 bows and 148 arrows from the collections Frikel (1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1965), Frikel and Wallace (1969), Sargento Leão do Vale (1974), Frikel and Cortez (1975), and Roberto and RuthCortez (1975). The description was based on a demonstrative specimen of each classified piece, twenty-nine in total. The constitutive structures of the artifacts were analyzed, as well as the raw material used, since the description of the bows and arrows served as a basis for the making of the catalog of Tiriyó pieces. The study of ethnographic collections located in museums is pertinent in that it organizes museological, anthropological, and historical information, by virtue of the development of the analysis of the indigenous material culture. Each artifact is subject to analysis of physical properties such as material composition, manufacturing techniques, and contextual analysis of the uses, functions, and other meanings contained in the pieces, since they contain extremely rich and complex information, of different orders, about the societies that produced them.