Posted on 10/11/2008 2:07:42 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
I was only slightly surprised when, in 1978, during excavations at a badly pot-hunted cemetery at the site of Nacascolo on the Bay of Culebra in Guanacaste, we encountered the first Red Ochre burial ever reported from Greater Nicoya.
The Nacascolo burial was from approximately 1,200 years ago, making it more than a millennium more recent than the Wisconsin red ochre burials. At Nacascolo, a central male figure was surrounded by carefully sorted piles of the arm and leg bones of previously buried males of apparently more or less the same age, who had been moved aside to make room for the most recent addition -- perhaps this was the shaman's plot, or the chieftain's plot? The skulls of the previous burials were stacked around the extended individual as well.
In a similar fashion to the Old Copper/Red Ochre burials from Wisconsin, the Nacascolo burial, in addition to being heavily stained by red ochre (see accompanying photograph with this article), was also surrounded and adorned with exotic and imported cultural artifacts. Most impressively, more than a half-dozen white-slipped- and polychrome-painted ceramic vessels portraying wild turkeys and pizotes (coatis), among other figures, had been brought at some time in the past from over 150 kilometers in distance from the other end of Greater Nicoya, in Pacific Nicaragua, from the area near Rivas (although a distance as great as between the Gulf Coast and Wisconsin, mentioned above, would take us from Nacascolo into southern Mexico!). A copper bell of the style made in Honduras during this prehistoric period also accompanied the burial.
(Excerpt) Read more at journalcr.com ...
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Interesting, but, ultimately, what does it matter? Burials in red ochre or burials without red ochre? The dead are still dead. And our modern efforts to give special importance to those graves will blow away like sand in the wind.
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