Além da morte: simbologias e significados nos sítios-cemitérios de Maracá/igarapé do lago, Estado do Amapá. Descrição, análise e iconografia de suas urnas funerárias

Abstract

In an attempt to contribute to a better understanding about the "web of meanings", which the material culture, especially the indigenous one, is imbued with, the present work, under an archeological foundation and, relying on the attributes provided by funerary archeology and symbolic anthropology, has as its main bias the contextualization of the funerary objects from the cemetery-sites of Maracá, Igarapé do Lago, Amapá State. To this end, it was considered that the material analyzed is endowed with symbolic meanings and representations that instigate human knowledge and, because of this, require decoding, or at least the search for it - despite all the weaknesses and limitations attributed to archeological material, especially Amazonian material. The urns were submitted to an analytical methodology, where, in the laboratory, besides being photographed, they were identified, described and analyzed, using forms and a database created for such purposes. Besides this, I related theoretical and methodological assumptions about the socio-cultural system that involves death, along with its cognitive and behavioral aspects, to the mortuary treatment of these people of yesteryear. Therefore, laboratory work and theoretical referential are intrinsic to the systematic results desired and, initiated since the field work, in previous stages of this sub-project. The Maracá urns, along with their spatial, structural, and morphological complexities, are targeted as a material medium that allows a better understanding of the cultural conjuncture implicit in the funerary system - or what remains of it - of a people we call Maracá. Narrow cultural, social and cosmological interactions with the nature in which they were confined are perceived, translated through intense symbolic networks and connections in a "prehistoric" past.