Jaguaruna Sambaqui

28.6144°S, 49.0256°W.

The Jaguaruna Sambaqui in Santa Catarina state, southern Brazil — one of the largest of the approximately 2,000 sambaquis (shell-mound platform pyramids) constructed by the pre-ceramic Sambaqui culture along the Brazilian Atlantic coast between approximately 7,000 and 1,000 BCE. The Jaguaruna mound is approximately 30 metres tall and 400 metres long, composed almost entirely of sea-shell deposits — primarily oyster, mussel, and clam shells — interspersed with hearth layers, fish bones, and human burials. Sambaquis were not garbage dumps as nineteenth-century interpretations assumed: they are deliberately constructed mortuary mounds, with skeletal remains laid in stratigraphic layers throughout the structure and the upper surfaces flattened for periodic ritual reuse. Excavated by Brazilian missions through the twentieth century and intensively since the 1990s. The Sambaqui culture left no pottery, no metalwork, and no surviving language — only thousands of shell-mound pyramids along three thousand kilometres of coastline.

The largest mortuary shell-mound on the South American coast, built by a culture whose only documented architecture is itself.