Área de interface ceramista pretérita: a coleção arqueológica José Alberto Neves

Abstract

This work deals with the analysis of the Archaeological Collection José Alberto Neves, which is unprecedented and composed of about twenty-five to thirty-five thousand pieces. The collection is headquartered in Urucurituba-AM; it is private, and the collector keeps the pieces in an area of his residence. The objective was to inventory it and make it available in a digital database and publication reference book to be approved by the governing body of the Brazilian archaeological heritage. The Amazon, for its territorial area and by being in the largest rainforest in the world and also for having the largest river basin and the major navigable rivers, enabled that the preterit human societies could be able to create alternatives to cultivate large numbers of products to the their feed. In addition, environmental conditions allowed that in the last two millennia there could be huge human settlements in the Amazon. Among the various alternatives to adapt to the environment, hot and humid, the ceramic industry was perhaps a useful tool for the sustainability of settlements. For the analysis of the collection, we used the systemic method of spiral, because the ceramic had certain functions within societies that interacted on the banks of rivers. From the analysis, we deduced that the colors of the ceramics could be associated with the tattoos or paintings on the bodies of the natives. They are descriptions that were made by naturalists who have been in the area during the nineteenth century. Moreover, those paintings are present in the fauna of the region. Finally, the ceramics was used in daily life and for the funeral events during a long period, in the area of the Middle Amazonas River and its tributaries. Therefore the archaeological researches and the ethnographic literatures have been discovering gradually the way of life of the indigenous pre-Columbian societies.