Qualla: Ilha do Marajó

Ilha do Marajó: Introduction

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Start with an urn. It stands perhaps half a meter high, painted in red and black on a white slip, its surface worked into interlocking geometric bands and the stylized figure of a woman. Inside are cremated human remains, and a bowl was set over the mouth to close it. It was made on Marajó, at the mouth of the Amazon, by potters working within a tradition that lasted centuries and produced two distinct grades of ware - plain vessels for the kitchen, elaborate ones for the dead. For most of the twentieth century, the standard account of Amazonia held that the rainforest was too poor to sustain a society capable of making such a thing. The urns were the evidence that the standard account was wrong.

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Ilha do Marajó: The Tesos

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Marajoara built upward, because the island floods. Their settlements sit on tesos - earthen mounds raised in layers, often on top of ground that was naturally a little higher to begin with. Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, excavating and surveying in the 1980s, mapped more than four...

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Ilha do Marajó: A World Organized Around Women

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What the mounds contain is as striking as their scale. Houses had tamped earth floors and were arranged in clans that appear to have been matrilineal, with households organized around the women who stayed put while husbands moved in. The iconography agrees: female figures dominat...

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Ilha do Marajó: After Contact

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, and within a few generations roughly ninety percent of the indigenous population of the region was dead, overwhelmingly from Eurasian diseases against which they had no immunity. That is not a footnote to the archaeology; it is the ...

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Ilha do Marajó: Half a Million Buffalo

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The animal that now defines Marajó is not native either. Asian water buffalo number around 450,000 on the island, comfortably outnumbering the people, and how they got here is a matter of competing legends - a ship that sank offshore, or escapees from French Guiana who crossed th...

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Ilha do Marajó: Water Decides

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At about 40,100 square kilometers - close to the area of Switzerland - Marajó is the second-largest island in South America, bounded by the Amazon, the Pará and the Tocantins rivers and by the Atlantic. From December to June the eastern half is under water. Lake Arari swells to s...

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