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Marajo jar

Marajó jar
AD 400–1300
Island of Marajó, Brazil
Clay, slip
16 x 19 cm
Gift of the Mattatuck Historical Society
24/1938

The earliest-known ceramics from the Amazon basin are from Brazil’s Marajó Island. Located at the mouth of the Amazon River, the island was inhabited as early as 1400 BC, and is notable for its distinctively incised and painted pottery, as well as for platform mounds—evidence of highly ranked, chiefly societies found nowhere else in the Amazon.