Sambaquis from the Southern Brazilian Coast: Landscape Building and Enduring Heterarchical Societies throughout the Holocene

Abstract

This paper presents a heterarchical model for the regional occupation of the sambaqui (shellmound) societies settled in the southern coast of Santa Catarina, Brazil. Interdisciplinary approaches articulate the geographical scope and environmental dynamics of the Quaternary with human occupation patterns that took place therein between the middle and late Holocene (approximately 7.5 to 1.5 ky BP). The longue durée perspective on natural and social processes, as well as landscape construction, evince stable, integrated, and territorially organized communities around the lagoon setting. Funerary patterns, as well as mound distribution in the landscape, indicate a rather equalitarian society, sharing the economic use of coastal resources in cooperative ways. This interpretation is reinforced by a common ideological background involving the cult of the ancestors, which seems widespread all over the southern Brazilian shores along that period of time. Such a long-lived cultural tradition has endured until the arrival of fully agricultural Je and Tupi speaking societies in the southern shores.

Keywords

• sambaquis
• shellmounds
• heterarchy
• southern Brazilian coast