These utensils were made of good quality clay burnt at a very high temperature, giving rise to high-quality vessels. The most striking Stilt House artefacts are the small objects, like plates and bowls, which most likely were used in serving foods or liquids in rituals. The straws of the cottage walls and roofs and utensils made from the hardwood, like oars and indigenous weapons (bordunas), also resisted the decomposition process over time. It also notable that the oxygen-free aquatic environment preserved the artefacts in such a way that even allowed the ink on the artefacts to remain visible. It is also likely that these dwellings had defensive purposes. It is assumed that the easy availability of food in the form of a rich variety of fish created a favourable situation for the sedentary housing of the human groups that occupied the region. Santa Helena, Penalva, Pinheiro, and Viana are the main cities in this area. Baixada Maranhense population lives from the subsistence of traditional agriculture, fishing, keeping small animals and growing vegetables. People are very poor, with the lowest HDI indices not only in Maranhão state but also in Brazil as a whole. This region comprises approximately an area of 20,000 km 2 within the legal Amazon and has more than 500,000 inhabitants. In the Amazonian eastern coast, the geographical area where the Stilt Houses are located is called Baixada Maranhense, in the State of Maranhão, Brazil. Map of the stilt villages in eastern Amazon ad apparent stilts at the time of the drought. The ancient stilt villages have been also common in the prehistory of Europe during the Neolithic age, for instance in northern Italy and Switzerland (Lake Constanza). However, as known today, the prehistoric palafittes of Maranhão are the only ones preserved, in the entire American continent ( Figure 1). The stilt villages also appear in the reports of Amazon river mouth and from the Upper Amazon, near Peru. This type of archaeological sites has been described in isolated cases in South America, namely in the reports of Amerigo Vespucci in 1499 on communities that lived in Stilt Houses on the Venezuelan coast. In some of these prehistoric sites, such as Coqueiro, there can be over three thousand stilts. Rest of the year, the palafittes are submerged. This normally corresponds annually to October to December. Traces of these wooden stilts are located within rivers and lakes and are shown only at the time of drought. Stumps or trunks of trees served as a support for the superior buildings of the villages. The stilt villages were ancient dwellings (palafittes) built on piles over a lake. Having presented above the definition of art and studies in the Amazon, this text addresses the art in the Brazilian precolonial stilt villages of eastern Amazon societies, temporally between the 8th to the 10th A.D., thus, they no longer existed during the period of European conquest in the 16th century. To understand the indigenous art the Amerindian Perspectivism, also under structuralist influence, has been used successfully, especially making the shamanistic relationships between men and animals more noticeable. In those magic gives a more pronounced property to the objects, what the author called incantation technologies. Gell saw the artefacts as social and non-static agents, which highlighted the activities they were involved, such as rituals. Among the theoretical assumptions about art that found greater development in Amazon is the structuralist school and its variations, mainly through the works of Lévi-Strauss who regarded the art as an expression of communication and sociability. However, many important paths have already been walked. However, it is still difficult to define the diverse variations of the art types of these societies, partly because there is no conceptual standardisation, or partly as the variability is not fully known, yet, due to the complexity and enormous size of the precolonial Amazon. Īrtistic manifestations filled the precolonial Amazon and invited the archaeologists to study these themes. Many archaeologists think that the art should be understood within a much broader semantic significance: (a) artistic manifestations, functioning as symbolism (b) cosmological message vehicles serving to communicate social, political and religious values of a certain society (c) or art to be on its own, as a social cohesion form or political control strategy, to demonstrate these same values to other peoples, as a form of ethnic identity. As far as Archaeology, the myth usually is represented in the ceramic support as Art. In Amazon, the myths rely on the animal metaphor as the social component of the cosmology. They are memory, a vehicle of cosmological message and identity. It contains creation stories and explains all the elements necessary to understand the universe. Myths provide cultural explanations for understanding the world.
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