Resumen de Early Holocene ritual complexity in South America: the archaeological record of Lapa do Santo (east-central Brazil)

André Strauss, Rodrigo Elias Oliveira, Ximena S. Villagran, Danilo V. Bernardo, Domingo C. Salazar-García, Marcos César Bissaro, Enrique Pugliese, Tiago Hermenegildo, Rafael Santos, Alberto Barioni, Emiliano Castro de Oliveira, João Carlos Moreno de Sousa, Klervia Jaouen, Max Ernani, Mark Hubbe, Mariana Inglez, Marina Gratão, H. Rockwell, Márcia Machado, Gustavo de Souza, Farid Jr. Chemale, Koji Kawashita, Tamsin C. O'Connell, Isabel Israde Alcántara, James Feathers, Claudio Campi, Mike Richards, Joachim Wahl, Renato Kipnis, Astolfo Araujo, Walter Neves

• Early Archaic human skeletal remains found in a burial context in Lapa do Santo in east-central Brazil provide a rare glimpse into the lives of hunter-gatherer communities in South America, including their rituals for dealing with the dead. These included the reduction of the body by means of mutilation, defleshing, tooth removal, exposure to fire and possibly cannibalism, followed by the secondary burial of the remains according to strict rules. In a later period, pits were filled with disarticulated bones of a single individual without signs of body manipulation, demonstrating that the region was inhabited by dynamic groups in constant transformation over a period of centuries.