The World of Anaconda: the myth of the snake-canoe and its relationship with the stilt villages from eastern amazon

Abstract

Amazonian ethnography relies on a world created by an anaconda, an ancestral creator. The story that myths tell is that the Amazon River is the metaphor of an anaconda; a large, meandering reptile. While the Anaconda sails along the great river, it populates the riverbanks, creating the Indian villages along its margins. This is why the anaconda is a snake-canoe. Amazonian societies are classified by archeology as belonging to the Polychrome Tradition of the Amazon (TPA). This research suggests that stilt villagers in eastern Amazonia, where shamanism played a role in communicating with animals, also shared this myth. The anaconda embodied in ceramic archaeological sites is as a memory of this complex indigenous narrative as it develops across time.

Ancestral Waters: Material Culture, Notion of Transformation and Shamanism in the Stilt Villages in Eastern Amazonia

“…The character's curious expression, looking up, seems to evoke that he is emerging from the bottom of the vessel; the flexed arms ratify this posture. Figure 8b shows a serene character, with anaconda body paint (Navarro 2020a), a shamanic Amazonian animal. This head is elongated, resembling a cranial deformation, and the incised eyes are closed, giving the impression that the human is dead.…”

“…Superficial collections of abundant archaeological material from the mapping of the stilt villages made it possible to organize typologies of the pottery, which are composed of artifacts that carry important information about the way of life of the peoples in terms of their cosmologies (Navarro 2020a,b). In this sense, the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic appliqués, in addition to the iconographic painting of the bowls, are indispensable sources for the understanding of the life of the people of the stilt villages.…”

“Medieval” Islands on the Amazonian Coast: Medieval Remains in the Amazonian Popular Culture and Culturally Interlarded Myths

“…This ceramic cookware comes in a range of different sizes and produce various polyphonic counds. In this sense, the snake-canoe could imply the origin of ceramic activity among the Wauja [15].…”

“…Among the Mochica, the sacred world is represented by animals that play an important role in the cosmic order. The nocturnal deity or god of the Milky Way is an anthropomorphic being that carries the celestial dome; it takes the form of a twoheaded snake [15]. 8 On the Island of Marajó, the greatest one in Brazil, these cross-cultural serpent-women at times show themselves sailing accross the Amazonian rivers transformed into boats or ships guided by no rudder or boatswain, looking phantom ships.…”

“…Despite the distance between different indigenous groups along the Amazon basin, Barreto (2008) points to the fact that certain iconographic elements are pan-Amazonian; their symbology is based on the relationship between animals and human beings, elements of which generate narratives and myths among the indigenous groups. In this sense, these mythological histories, which inhabit both the past and the present of indigenous groups, make us think of a "general Amazonian indigenous art with regional variations and regional styles" (Barreto 2008: 22) [15]. The works and archaeological exploration of Professor Navarro and the LARQ -Laboratory of Archaeology pertaining to the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA) -indicate a shamanic nature of the snake, specially the Anacondas, in the Amazon.…”