On urns, places, beings and people: materiality and substances in the constitution of an Aristé funerary pit

Abstract

In the last decade, a series of systematic archaeological excavations was carried out by the Instituto de Pesquisas Científicas e Tecnológicas do Estado do Amapá, resulting in very rich and diversified assemblages, which have been studied by many members of the research team. In this article, I propose to study a funerary structure which contains a collection of ceramics, including anthropomorphic urns from archaeological contexts which were carefully documented. From there, I seek to explore their agentive capacities, connecting their material properties, aesthetic aspects and contextual information. I follow a perspective drawn from Amazonian indigenous Ethnology, which highlights the potency of materiality in the relationships with different peoples, aiming at producing narratives which express the aesthetic care in their production in order to attract the eye and produce relations to whoever encounter them. Beyond their beauty, my aim is to explore ways in which pottery and other materials might point to a series of relationships which people who produced and used them were activating and using among people, places and other beings.

Keywords
Aristé Phase; Indigenous Ethnology; Materiality; Substances