The site of Capelinha is a Paleoindian site in the Ribeira do Iguape Valley of Sao Paulo state in Brazil, and it is a shell midden with six human burials. Radiocarbon and AMS dates place the burials between 10,500 and 9900 years old. Of the six burials, five were badly fragmented; the sixth was an adult male, an articulated primary burial.
The site was excavated by G. C. Collet in the mid-1980s, and physical anthropological studies of the skeleton have been conducted by a team out of the University of Sao Paulo, led by Walter Neves. Based on comparison with the W.W. Howell's collections, the skeletal material from Capelinha appears to be 'Australo-melanesian' type, as defined by Neves.
Sources
This glossary entry is part of the About.com Guide to Paleoindians in America and the Dictionary of Archaeology.
Neves, Walter A., et al. 2005 A new early Holocene human skeleton from Brazil: implications for the settlement of the New World. Journal of Human Evolution 48(4):403-414.
