The mining of lime in brazilian shell mounds in the nineteenth century
University of São Paulo - Brazil
About WAC8
[kitchen midden] is an English word, which means an accumulation of
kitchen waste. If that word were not so difficult to assimilate, it would be
convenient to adopt it in Portuguese, in which there is no precise equivalent
word. The word Sambaqui, […] is defective, because it does not involve
necessarily the idea of human action. This word is applied to any accumulation
of shells, whether natural or artificial.
HARTT, Carlos. Contribuições para a ethnologia do valle do Amazonas. Archivos do Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro, vol. 6, pp. 1- 174, 1885.
Scarcely had their [the Committee
from Royal Danish Society] examination commenced when it became apparent that
these deposits were the culinary debris of villages of the Stone Age, the
population of which fed largely on shellfish, chiefly the oyster, cockle,
mussel and periwinkle […] When first
visited by Professor Steenstrup the shells were being removed to serve as
manure, but previous to that it appears to gave been greatly undermined by
workman in search of gravel for road metal.
MUNRO, Robert. Danish Kjökkenmöddings, their facts and inferences. Proceedings of the Society. Londres, 10 mar 1884, pp. 217-8.
