Mortuary practice comparisons of the indigenous people of the Manteño culture on the southern Ecuadorian coast

During their earliest period (ca. 500 – 1500 AD), the living people of the Manteño culture turned away from traditional styles of primary, individual burials, and secondary bone bundle burials. Instead, the living employed a custom of comingling multiple individuals of all ages and both sexes within large ceramic urn vessels. It is this distinctive style of urn burials that delineate the people of the Manteño culture from the other cultures within the history of Coastal Ecuador. The aim of this thesis is to compare the human skeletal collection of feature 86 with that of four other Manteño Period urn collections and test Dr. Douglas Ubelaker’s previous hypotheses which include the people of the Manteño culture incorporated a multi-step mortuary custom which resulted in secondary urn interments of patriarchal-led, familial tombs. Through a series of five questions, Dr. Ubelaker’s hypotheses are tested. Findings reveal the people of the Manteño culture placed their deceased in a primary repository for a period of time, then utilized recycled, daily use urn vessels as secondary interments for both sexes and all age intervals. The mortuary practices of the people of the Manteño culture indicate the living valued a communal sense of identity, that personhood was ascribed to all age intervals, and that the relationships between the deceased individuals is still unclear. Future research includes the frequent use of recycling as a theme for the people of the Manteño, and bioarchaeological studies for inter-personal relationships of the decedents via biodistance studies, no-metric trait, and aDNA analyses.