Marajoara culture

The Marajoara or Marajó culture was a pre-Columbian era society that flourished on Marajó island at the mouth of the Amazon River. In a survey, Charles C. Mann suggests the culture appeared to flourish between 800 AD and 1400 AD, based on archeological studies. Researchers have documented that there was human activity at these sites as early as 1000 BCE. The culture seems to have persisted into the colonial era.

Archeologists have found sophisticated pottery in their excavations on the island. These pieces are large, and elaborately painted and incised with representations of plants and animals. These provided the first evidence that a complex society had existed on Marajó. Evidence of mound building further suggests that well-populated, complex and sophisticated settlements developed on this island, as only such settlements were believed capable of such extended projects as major earthworks.

The extent, level of complexity, and resource interactions of the Marajoara culture have been disputed. Working in the 1950s in some of her earliest research, American Betty Meggers suggested that the society migrated from the Andes and settled on the island. Many researchers believed that the Andes were populated by Paleoindian migrants from North America who gradually moved south after being hunters on the plains.

In the 1980s, another American archeologist, Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, led excavations and geophysical surveys of the mound Teso dos Bichos. She concluded that the society that constructed the mounds originated on the island itself.

The pre-Columbian culture of Marajó may have developed social stratification and supported a population as large as 100,000 people. The Native Americans of the Amazon rain forest may have used their method of developing and working in Terra preta to make the land suitable for the large-scale agriculture needed to support large populations and complex social formations such as chiefdoms.

Rossetti et al proposed that the archaeological settlements associated with isolated or compound mounds were "systematically developed on top of extensive elevated surfaces formed due to natural sedimentary processes".

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