Santa Marta Sambaqui

28.6000°S, 48.8167°W.

The Santa Marta Sambaqui in Santa Catarina state, southern Brazil — a major shell-mound platform pyramid of the Sambaqui culture, with construction phases dated by radiocarbon between approximately 4,000 and 0 BCE. The mound is approximately 25 metres tall and 300 metres long, composed of sea-shell deposits, hearth layers, fish vertebrae, and the skeletal remains of more than 100 documented Sambaqui-period burials interred at successive levels throughout the structure's six millennia of use. The Sambaqui dead were buried in flexed positions accompanied by polished stone zoolith pendants — small carved animal effigies of fish, whales, sea lions, and birds — that are diagnostic of the culture and unique to this mortuary tradition. Excavated by the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina and Brazilian state archaeological missions from the 1960s onward. The culture left no pottery, used no metals, and is documented exclusively through the architecture of its burial mounds.

A shell-mound pyramid built and rebuilt over four thousand years by a coastal mortuary culture whose only material legacy is the mounds themselves and the carved animals buried in them.