Marajoara Mounds (Teso dos Bichos)
Marajó Island Mounds · Marajoara Culture Mounds · Joanes Mounds
Marajoara Phase (Polychrome Tradition)·Marajoara (Arauan-derived Amazonian Polychrome)·🇧🇷 Pará, Marajó Island, Brazil
About
About Marajoara Mounds (Teso dos Bichos)
Earthen monumental landscape of the Marajoara culture (800–1400 CE) that built up to 40-m-high teso platform mounds on seasonally flooded Marajó Island at the Amazon mouth, supporting complex chiefdoms of up to 40,000 on anthropogenic savanna. Largest teso, Camutins, sprawls 70 ha with cemetery mounds containing 500+ elaborate red-on-white funerary urns with steatopygous anthropomorphs. Mounds were engineered by layering clay, sterile sand and occupation debris to raise villages above 3-m floods while creating borrow-pit fish ponds (açaizais) yielding managed pirarucu aquaculture—Amazonian hydraulic urbanism without stone.
Why it mattersClassic debate over Amazon cultural complexity—proof that floodplain ecology could support stratified societies without highland agronomy; key to understanding anthropogenic Amazonian landscapes.
Open questions
Mysteries & theories
Mysteries
- 01Why collapse ~1400 without external conquest
- 02Whether Marajoara represented stratified chiefdom vs heterarchical organization
Theories
- 01Hydraulic fish-farming staple enabling surplus and craft specialization
- 02Elite urn display as competitive mortuary politics in seasonal aggregation
Theories are interpretations, not findings. The seal above tells you how much scholarly weight the place carries.
History
How it came to be
- Built
- c.800–1400 CE
- Period
- Marajoara Phase (Polychrome Tradition)
- Culture
- Marajoara (Arauan-derived Amazonian Polychrome)
- Builders
- Marajoara mound builders
- Purpose
- Elite residential-ceremonial platforms and managed floodplain fishery with causeway links
- Abandoned
- c.1400 CE abrupt collapse (climate + resource stress)
- Rediscovered
- 1871 James Steere & Derby survey; 1980s Anna Roosevelt excavations
- Excavation
- Partially excavated
800 CE
Initial teso mound raising at Camutins
1000 CE
Peak mound hierarchy—three-tier settlement pattern
1300 CE
Elaborate urn necropolis phase
1981
Anna Roosevelt challenges 'counterfeit paradise' with island excavations
On the ground
Structures & features
0.9800° S · 49.5800° W · 8 m · 3 mapped features
Camutins Mound Complex
platform moundLargest teso—70 ha with elite residential crest and cemetery
0.9600° S · 49.6200° WTeso dos Bichos Necropolis
necropolis500-urn cemetery with red-on-white anthropomorphic vessels
0.9800° S · 49.5800° WJoanes Causeway
causeway1.8-km earthen causeway linking mound groups
1.0200° S · 49.5500° W
Gallery