**Abstract**

Amazonian ethnography is relied on the creation of the world by Animals as the Anaconda, considered an ancestral creator. The history that myths tell is that the Amazon River is the metaphor of an Anaconda because it has meanders like this snake and it is a large reptile-like the river itself. As far as Archaeology, many of these myths were represented in archaeological ceramic as Cosmology metaphor. Some animals like birds were presented as a ceramic rattle which noise is a shamanic trait of Amazonian Indian Cosmology. This chapter shows how the Stilt Villagers of the Eastern Amazonian built their Cosmology based on the Animals of their environment's Ecology.

**Keywords:** cosmology, ecology, prehistoric art, stilt villages, Amazon

## **1. Introduction: myths and animals**

Myths provide cultural explanations for understanding the world. It contains creation stories and explains all the elements necessary to understand the universe [1]. They are memory, a vehicle of cosmological message and identity [2]. In Amazon, the myths rely on the animal metaphor as the social component of the cosmology [3]. As far as Archaeology, the myth usually is represented in the ceramic support as Art.

Many archaeologists think that the art should be understood within a much broader semantic significance: (a) artistic manifestations, functioning as symbolism; (b) cosmological message vehicles serving to communicate social, political and religious values of a certain society; (c) or art to be on its own, as a social cohesion form or political control strategy, to demonstrate these same values to other peoples, as a form of ethnic identity [4].

Artistic manifestations filled the precolonial Amazon and invited the archaeologists to study these themes [5]. However, it is still difficult to define the diverse variations of the art types of these societies, partly because there is no conceptual standardisation [6], or partly as the variability is not fully known, yet, due to the complexity and enormous size of the precolonial Amazon [7].

However, many important paths have already been walked. Among the theoretical assumptions about art that found greater development in Amazon is the structuralist school and its variations, mainly through the works of Lévi-Strauss who regarded the art as an expression of communication and sociability [8]. Gell [9] saw the artefacts as social and non-static agents, which highlighted the activities they were involved, such as rituals. In those magic gives a more pronounced property to the objects, what the author called incantation technologies. To understand the

indigenous art the Amerindian Perspectivism [10], also under structuralist influence, has been used successfully, especially making the shamanistic relationships between men and animals more noticeable.
