© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M. Bonomo, S. Archila (eds.), South American Contributions to World Archaeology, One World Archaeology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73998-0_15 Chapter 15 Humanized Nature: Symbolic Representation of Fauna in Pottery from the Paraná River of South America Mariano Bonomo, Gustavo Politis, Laura Bastourre, and Germán Moreira Abstract In this chapter, the economic and symbolic relations between animals and pre-Hispanic indigenous people from the Middle and Lower Paraná River of Argentina, South America are discussed. This issue is approached throughout the analyses of pottery zoomorphic appendages, which represent birds, mammals, rep- tiles and mollusks, and are assigned to the Goya-Malabrigo archaeological entity (~2000 14 C yrs BP to seventeenth century). These appendages have realistic mor- phological details that allowed taxonomic identifcation at class, order, family, genus or species level. These pottery representations of the animals are contrasted with the faunal remains from the Goya-Malabrigo archaeological sites. The combi- nation of these different information sources shows that the preys that were regu- larly eaten were not depicted in the appendages, and that the nutritional role of animals was not favored in these representations. The present study allows a discus- sion about the human-animal interrelation, which in turn contributes to global theo- retical approaches, related to the humanization of nature. Keywords Zoomorphic appendages · Human-animal interrelation · Amerindian cosmologies · South American Lowlands · Late Holocene 15.1 Introduction Much of the contemporary anthropological theory on the interrelation between humans and animals was produced in South America. Key concepts such as totem- ism (Levi-Strauss, 1964), animism (Descola, 1992), perspectivism (Viveiros de Castro, 1998, 2010) and familiarization of wildlife (Erikson, 1987; Fausto, 1999) M. Bonomo (*) · G. Politis · L. Bastourre · G. Moreira CONICET-División Arqueología, Museo de La Plata, Facultad de Ciencias Naturales y Museo, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina e-mail: mbonomo@fcnym.unlp.edu.ar 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26