Forty-three human skeletons were found during the excavations of a project in the State of Maranhão, in Brazil, where the construction company MRV is building residential condominiums under the federal housing program Minha Casa Minha Vida.
In addition to the skeletons, the archaeological research and excavation work, carried out by the company W Lage Arqueologia and coordinated by archaeologist Wellington Lage, discovered a huge number of pieces of historical value: there are around 100 thousand fragments, including ceramics, lithic materials (making tools, stone), charcoal, bones and decorated shells.
Laboratory analyzes are still underway to discover precisely how old these materials and skeletons are, but the number of burials and the quantity of pieces found point to an archaeological site that could have unique value for the study of the Brazilian past.
Several skeletons were located under a ‘sambaqui’ (a type of hill made of shells and sediments built on the banks of rivers and on the coast by populations that inhabited Brazil thousands of years ago) and may belong, as preliminary analyzes indicate, to strong men and women of short stature who were carefully buried there.
In one of the graves, a ceramic vase found is possibly a type of production that dates from around 5,000 to 7,000 years ago and is found in other areas of Northern Brazil – the ceramic tradition of the people of Amazon dates back 8 thousand years.
It is not the first time that archaeological sites have been discovered during construction projects in São Luís, which, according to researchers, has been occupied for more than 7 thousand years. Another sambaqui, ‘Vinhais Velho’, was found during the construction of the Via Expressa, a highway, and held records of fishing and shellfish collectors who lived in the region around 3,000 years ago.
The discovery was made a few kilometers away and, after the removal of items of archaeological interest, the land – located in a middle-class neighborhood just under 5 km from the coastal avenue – will house 4 condominiums which will gain Caribbean names (Aruba, Havana, San Andrés and San Martin).
Source: G1