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National Geographic
a day ago
- Science
- National Geographic
A tree fell in the Amazon—and revealed mysterious urns of ancient human remains
Archaeologists still don't know who buried the urns or exactly how old they are. Archaeologist Geórgea Holanda works on one of the recovered funeral urns in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. Holanda and her colleagues say the urns don't match previously known pottery traditions in the area. Photograph by Geórgea Holanda, Mamirauá Institute When a massive tree toppled in the floodplains of Fonte Boa, a region in the Brazilian Amazon, local fishermen noticed something odd: The roots had hoisted two giant ceramic pots above ground. Nobody knew what they were or who had buried them. In June, the Brazilian government announced that archaeologists had identified the pots as funerary urns—possibly going back millennia—from Indigenous groups who inhabited the region before the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil about 500 years ago. Excavations revealed seven urns—some fragmented—entangled among the tree's roots, containing human bones. The largest stretched almost three feet in diameter and weighed about 770 pounds, says Márcio Amaral, an archaeologist with the Mamirauá Institute in Tefé, Brazil, who helped lead the excavations. 'We needed a whole day to loose this large one free from the roots and six men to move it from there,' he adds. Removing the urns from the ground and transporting them to the Mamirauá research lab in Tefé for study was a complex process. Walfredo Cerqueira, the community leader who mobilized his fellow fishermen to help in the excavations, recalls the unusual experience: 'We thought we'd get there with hoes and move things around easily, but from what I had seen of how archaeologists work on TV, I knew it would be slow work.' The tree fell in an area known as Cochila Lake, an archaeological site in the Middle Solimões river region. It is one of more than 70 artificial plains in the area built around 2,000 years ago by Indigenous groups to avoid floods during the river's high-water season. 'Given how little we know about [the past of] this region and how difficult it is to get there, this is really an unprecedented find,' says Karen Marinho, an archaeologist with the Federal University of the West Pará (UFOPA) who did not take part in the excavations. Last October, locals in the Amandarubinha community saw the toppled tree and contacted a local priest who reached out to the Mamirauá Institute, more than 150 miles away. With community help, archaeologists from the institute excavated the urns earlier this year. Photograph by Geórgea Holanda, Mamirauá Institute The urns don't match artifacts previously found nearby—and for now, they raise more questions than answers. (How long have humans been living in the Amazon?) Magazine for all ages starting at $25/year What we know about early Amazon pottery Pottery has a long history in the Amazon, and it's one of the few types of artifacts to survive in a damp, hot environment that's not ideal for archaeological preservation. Archaeologists from the Mamirauá Institute worked alongside community members to excavate the urns. Photograph by Geórgea Holanda, Mamirauá Institute (Top) (Left) and Photograph by Geórgea Holanda, Mamirauá Institute (Bottom) (Right) The first known human occupations of the Amazon region created ceramics in the Pocó-Açutuba tradition, dating between 1500 B.C. and A.D. 200. Ceramic containers in this tradition are richly decorated with different types of carved patterns. Next, came the Borda Incisa tradition, mainly characterized by cuts along the edges of ceramic vases and containers. Finally, from the fifth to the 16th centuries, the Polychrome ceramic tradition incorporated dyes in different colors, especially brown, red, black, and orange over a white or gray background. The urns do not seem to belong to any of the ceramic traditions known in the Middle Solimões or in the broader Brazilian Amazon. 'This is a type we haven't got records of yet,' Amaral says. The absence of ceramic lids set the new discoveries apart artistically. These funerary urns are also rounder than those produced in known styles, notes Anne Rapp Py-Daniel, an archaeologist with UFOPA who did not take part in the research. How did ancient Indigenous people bury their dead? The richness of the craft that turns these urns into pieces of art says much about how ancient Indigenous communities related to death in the Amazon. To these groups, 'death is a process, not a moment,' Py-Daniel observes. It is another rite of passage that involves effort and dedication from the whole group, especially if the deceased member had an important role in it. Some of the urns were up to three feet wide and required extra effort to remove them from the tree's root system. Here the team works to remove one of the urns. Photograph by Geórgea Holanda, Mamirauá Institute Putting bones within ceramic containers, Py-Daniel explains, would have been part of a second step in the funerary process. First, the departed must undergo a ritual to remove flesh, through burial, cremation, or submersion in a river—where the body is wrapped in a woven net that allows fish to feed on it. Then the bones are carefully collected and arranged to, in another ritual, be placed inside the urn. 'Indigenous groups who did not have their traditions obliterated by the presence of missionaries still [entirely or in part] follow this ritual,' Py-Daniel says. Throughout the Amazon, many groups once buried such vases with their dead beneath their houses (and some still do), says archaeologist Geórgea Holanda, who led the excavations with Amaral. 'On social media, many people ask us how a tree could have grown on top of the urns,' she says. 'The tree probably grew after the people who used to live in that region were gone.' As the tree grew, its roots made their way into the pots possibly drawn to nutrients in the bones, Holanda adds. While the tree's exact age remains unknown, its size suggests it could be centuries old, and the researchers suspect that the vases are even older. (Here's why a once isolated tribe took up cell phones and social media.) For now, the exact age and origin of the urns remains a mystery. The presence of fish and turtle bones around some of the ceramic fragments also raises questions. 'We still have to… find out what these leftovers are—whether they were part of an associated ritual,' Amaral says. Researchers at Mamirauá are currently cleaning and excavating sediments from within the urns while they look for funding to study the material. Ultimately, they hope to carbon-date fragments of bone and coal to get a more precise age estimate. 'It will all depend on funding and the partnerships we can get,' Holanda stresses. Even with these unknowns, Amaral and Holanda both feel that the most important aspect of the discovery was the deep involvement of locals from the Arumandubinha and Arará villages, who helped the archaeologists plan every single step of the process. 'The demand came from them, as they wanted to know what these artifacts were—otherwise we'd never know about the urns,' says Amaral. Community members helped build special scaffolding to remove the urns without doing further damage and guided the researchers on the best time to excavate. 'It all would have been impossible without them,' Holanda says.
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Indigenous funeral urns discovered deep in Amazon rainforest
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Seven giant funeral urns dating to pre-Columbian times have been found deep in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest. A fisher who works in this little-known waterlogged area of the middle Solimões region, along the upper course of the Amazon River, made the discovery after a 50-foot-tall (15 meters) Paricarana tree fell over, revealing the urns buried beneath it. The age of the urns is currently unknown; being Pre-Columbian, they're either centuries or millennia old. But their burial place — a human-made island — is extraordinary, although it's unknown if the culture that created the islands also crafted the urns, according to archaeologists at the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development (IDSM) in Brazil. Two of the larger ceramic urns — which measure up to 35 inches (89 centimeters) in diameter — contained human bones, while the others held a mixture of seeds and the remains of fish, frogs and turtles, said Geórgea Layla Holanda, an archaeologist at the IDSM who co-led the excavation. These seed and animal remains were likely part of the funeral ritual. The finds are "unprecedented," she said in a translated statement from the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. The large urns do not have ceramic lids, "possibly because they were sealed with organic materials that decomposed," Holanda told Live Science. However, somewhat similar ceramic finds have been made elsewhere in the middle Solimões area. In these cases, urns would have lids "representing the head, with structures on the sides imitating limbs," she said. "The greenish clay pottery is rare but has been seen at other sites in the region," Holanda said. "We also found fragments with applied layers of clay on the exterior and painted red bands, though it is not yet possible to link these to any known ceramic styles." Related: Why are there no bridges over the Amazon River? Archaeologists already know that funerals involving urns generally included multiple stages, she added. "After death, the body was left in a basket in the river so that fish would consume the soft tissues, or it was buried in the ground," Holanda said. "Afterwards, the disarticulated [jumbled] bones were cremated and placed inside funerary urns, which symbolized a new body, a new skin. Finally, many Amazonian cultures buried these pots beneath their homes." The month-long fieldwork was planned in coordination with residents of the nearby community of São Lázaro do Arumandubinha, who first alerted researchers to the finding. "This was a community-driven demand, which understood the historical importance of these objects," Márcio Amaral, an archaeologist at IDSM who co-led the excavation, told Live Science. The São Lázaro do Arumandubinha community advised the excavators when to avoid seasonal river flooding, since the archaeological site, called Lago do Cochila (or Cochila Lake), lies in a flooded zone with no access to firm ground. To reach this remote area of the Brazilian Amazon, the research team traveled more than 24 hours by boat along the winding Amazon River from the institute's base in Tefé to the community, canoed 11 miles (18 kilometers) through flooded areas, and then walked for one hour through the forest along a trail the guides hacked out with machetes. Image 1 of 2 Excavation equipment and recovered artifacts were transported by canoe. Image 2 of 2 Researchers improvised scaffolding using wood and vines to carry out excavations in the Amazon rainforest. Because of the difficult conditions where the urns lay, excavations were carried out on a platform raised 10 feet (3 m) above the ground, built with wood and vines by community members. RELATED STORIES —12,500-year-old rock art 'canvas' in the Amazon reveals early Americans' connection with wildlife —Lasers reveal ancient settlements hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest —Archaeologists find vast network of Amazon villages laid out like the cosmos The funeral urns were buried about 15 inches (40 cm) deep on an artificial island built by ancestral Indigenous people. These people used earth to make this island as well as others in the region, primarily to protect the community from river floods, Amaral said. Now that the excavation is done, the researchers plan to date the urns. They also have additional local reports of urns at other archaeological sites in the region, including on nearby artificial islands.
Yahoo
24-06-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A Fallen Tree Exposed 7 Ancient Urns—With Human Bones Inside
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: Archaeologists searching under a toppled tree in the Amazon discovered seven funerary urns buried beneath the roots. Of the seven urns—two larger than the others—skeletal remains included that of humans and animals. The pre-Hispanic find also included an unknown variety of ceramic. If a tree falls in the Amazon, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? While you were busy trying to answer that question, local villagers heard the tree fall and, upon checking out the commotion, found a collection of mysterious urns that had been buried underneath the toppled tree. The urns pose plenty of still-unanswered questions about the people that once lived there and made the pots. Shortly after locals found the cache of mysterious containers, a team of archaeologists came to investigate and, upon cracking open the urns, discovered the remains of humans and animals, including turtles. The discovery, made in a remote village in Brazil's Amazon Rainforest interior, included seven urns, two of which were larger than the rest. Archaeologists from the Mamirauá Institute said in a translated statement the funerary urns contained a mix of pre-Hispanic human and animal skeletons, in addition to being made with a rare ceramic material. The human remains were intermingled with that of fish and turtles, likely part of a ritual burial practice. Coupled with the unusual ceramic techniques, archaeologist Geórgea Layla Holanda said the pots and remains could be from an unknown multicultural society that can reveal new clues about the way of life in the Médio Solimões region. The large urns were without lids, suggesting they were once sealed with organic material that has since decomposed. Located only 16 inches deep, Holanda said they were likely once buried 'beneath old houses.' The ceramics were covered in green clay, a rare practice seen at a few other locations in the heavily forested Médio Solimões region. Along with the green clay, the team found red stripes added to the pots. Still, according to the release, there's no direct link between these pots and known ceramic traditions. Discovered at the Cochila Lake archaeological site, known for artificial islands constructed an unknown number of centuries ago, the area is a hotbed for ancient ingenuity. 'These artificial islands are raised archaeological structures on high floodplains, with material removed from other areas and mixed with ceramic fragments, intentionally positioned to give support,' archaeologist Márcio Amaral said in a statement. 'It's a very sophisticated indigenous engineering technique, which demonstrated significant land management and population density in the past.' Villagers from São Lázaro do Arumandubinha and other communities worked with the archaeologists to excavate the urns and move them on canoes to a laboratory where researchers hope to gain a deeper understanding of their origins. 'Some community members saw the pots when a tree fell and left the roots exposed, but they didn't give it much importance,' Walfredo Cerqueira, a liaison with the villagers, said in a statement, adding that when he saw the photos, he started the process of getting in touch with archaeologists. 'From there, we started planning the trip to the site.' To excavate the urns, archaeologists had to construct wooden structures just to get to the site in the river-heavy location. Once excavated, it took the urns up to 12 hours to travel via river canoe—and sometimes through tight streams and flooded areas—to the laboratory. 'The community showed a care and skill that often surpass the urban shippers,' Holanda said. 'Thanks to this meticulous work, the urns arrived intact.' The urns were wrapped in plastic film and bubble wrap before being placed in wooden supports. Ropes helped enable the lifting of the urns into the canoes. Finding a burial site questions the traditional view that the floodplain areas were only places of passage or sporadic occupation, instead indicating a continuous presence of people highly adapted to the environment. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
