Marajo

Marajo refers to the heirs of the Marajoara tradition, the mound-building society of Marajó Island at the mouth of the Amazon. Human settlement began as early as 1000 BC, and from roughly the fourth century it grew into a stratified chiefdom society of perhaps a hundred thousand people, living on raised earth mounds called tesos and farming with artificial terra preta soils.

Its hallmark is a ceramic tradition: large white-slipped vessels painted in red and black, modeled figures and funerary urns buried under house floors for elite ancestors. Iconography suggests shamanic rites and a cosmology divided between male sun and female moon, with female creator figures.

The great centers were in decline by around 1400 as the island's riverine exchange networks shrank, though village-level Marajoara life seems to have lingered into the colonial period. The people's original language is unattested.