Costumbres funerarias en el Conchalito, La Paz, Baja California Sur

Abstract

The burial form well-know for the South of the peninsula of Baja California, consists on colored secondary human funerals with red ocher, wrapped in fiber or palm leaf, bundle with lines and deposited in roof caves under. Recent archaeological studies in a shell midden located in La Paz cove, The Conchalito, have revealed a new funeral system: sectional burial. Ten years of study it has allowed to establish that the conchalenses buried twice to their deads, the first one happened to the moment of the death, when the body previously shrouded in flexioned form, was placed in a not very deep grave and had already placed a layer or “bed of shells” and accompanied with objects of personal use. Past around 6 to 8 months, the body was exhumed and in a ceremony you proceeded to generally sectioned the cadaver in two parts. They were not used court instruments for body separated, but rather they takes advantage of the natural process of rot, mechanism that one already has perfectly documented. The union of historical and ethnographic studies allow to settle down that this funeral habit are inside the cosmological vision of the pattern of the double burial