communicate ideas, beliefs, group affiliation, mythology and
cosmology. Accordingly, the decoration of objects would have played
an important social role, conveying information. In such a context,
prehistoric art would be a type of language. Instead of being oral or
written, prehistoric art is essentially a visual language.
the fact that the Amerindian populations may have used
other materials, such as wood, bones and fibers to
artistically express their ideas. These ideas acquired visual
status on geometric designs, which resemble the local
fauna. Animals such as snakes, lizards, caimans,
scorpions, and turtles were represented as spirals,
triangles, rectangles, concentric circles, and waves, among
others, in various techniques. The study of these discrete
icons and their placement on the design allowed the
identification of the zoomorphic themes, possibly
supernatural or mythological beings. Schaan characterized
it as an iconographic language.
new form of social organization was legitimized through rituals, during which a
shaman built a bridge between the ordinary world and the world of spirits and
ancestors. Over that bridge, symbols and images conceived during hallucinogenic
trances were transported and thus Marajoara art was born.
are found without heads,
and several heads are
found without bodies.
Schaan has suggested
that they may have had
been ritually broken.
European domination, since those populations did not have resistance to diseases,
and succumbed to wars and missionization. However, they left behind their
ceramics and the ancient mounds where they lived, performed their ceremonies,
and also buried their dead. Due to their use of ceramics in funerary rituals, their art
has survived until the present day. Not by accident, its novelty has been
preserved, since it vehicles are a cosmology built over a circular time, which,
together with the Marajoara designs themselves, teach us that the beginning is
always and inexorably attached to the end. An end that is nothing else but another
starting point.
