COLUMN ONE : Amazon Murder Mystery : Yanomamis say miners killed a clan of Indians. Skeptics call the massacre claim a hoax. Officials are thwarted by a culture gap as they try to find out what really happened.

The Yanomami forest people cremate the bones of their dead and grind them into dust, which they sometimes eat in a plantain gruel as they wail and weep in mourning. They observe a strict taboo against mentioning Yanomamis who have died, except during this funeral ritual.

These unusual religious practices are playing a key role in a difficult, perplexing investigation of reports that a gang of clandestine gold prospectors recently massacred a clan of Yanomamis in the densely forested mountains not far from this isolated outpost.

Indians have asserted that dozens of their relatives were slaughtered by prospectors; some of the widely publicized accounts have put the death toll as high as 73.

Still, police say they have yet to find solid proof that a massacre occurred. And many people in the frontier city of Boa Vista, 200 miles away, doubt the Indians and suspect that the story of killings may be made up to help the Yanomamis’ cause.

The jungle and the city are alive with conflicting information, rumors and imaginative theories. As facts and fancy waver and blur in the white-hot light of the tropical sun, there seem to be good reasons for believing there was a massacre--and other good reasons for doubting it.

True or not, the reports of the killings and the commotion they have caused demonstrate again that emotions run deep as the bitter battle continues for control of Indian homelands in the vast Amazon region.

The struggle here not only pits the ancient against the modern but also sparks running disputes over issues such as national sovereignty and foreign intervention. And this incident underscores the difficulties experienced even by advocates of the Yanomami when the urgent impulses of the modern world clash with the Indians’ plodding and seemingly primitive culture.

The most immediate question about the reported massacre is this: Where are the bodies?

Initial searches in the area where the incident allegedly occurred turned up skeletal remains of only one person in a cluster of burned Indian huts, along with five leaf-wrapped packages containing material that officials of the government’s Indian agency said was probably human ashes.

A preliminary forensic report confirmed over the weekend that the bones are those of an Indian woman who was felled by shotgun fire. Police said laboratory analysis of the packages from the huts will take up to two weeks.

About a day’s walk from the huts, searchers found charred remnants of two Indian lodges at a place called Haximu. The ground was littered with spent shotgun shells and .38-caliber bullet casings. Holes in wood poles and broken clay dishes indicated that there had been gunfire at the lodges. But there were no signs of human remains.

At this site, as with the investigation as a whole, authorities have been hampered in their efforts by logistic nightmares.

There are no roads and only a few trails into the rugged, mountainous country where the Indians live much the same way they have for hundreds of years. Investigators must travel in bush planes or helicopters--or else hike through the forbidding forest. They are laboring in an equatorial clime where torrential storms are common in the now-ending rainy season, and a torrid heat settles in on clear days.

These conditions leave the Yanomamis unfazed as they dart naked through the trees, hunting with bows and arrows. Their clans live together in large communal lodges, rustic circular structures with thatched roofs. They seem like simple people--sometimes they are referred to as “Stone Age” Indians--but their language and social system are complex; their cultural concepts do not translate easily.

Francisco Bezerra, a grizzled Indian agent with the National Indian Foundation, the governmental agency that deals with native peoples, has played the role of intermediary between the Yanomami and those investigating the massacre reports.

One problem in the investigation, he noted, is that Yanomamis do not count beyond two, making it difficult to try to fix a potential death or injury toll. (The Indians when enumerating beyond two simply refer to “many.”) Bezerra said he got numbers of victims by asking men about the fate of their wives and children.

He said that interpreting for the police has been tedious and frustrating. For example, instead of telling outsiders their native names, Yanomamis employ nicknames in Portuguese, the Brazilian language. The Indians have especially resisted naming people who they say were killed by prospectors; they sometimes grow angry at his questions.

“We are violating their culture,” Bezerra said. “In their culture, you don’t talk about the dead.”

Bezerra was in this Indian agency outpost Friday, helping in the massacre investigation and talking to reporters. Yanomami men and boys stood around, watching curiously. They spoke only a few words of Portuguese but chattered in their own language.

Police and other Indian agents were coming and going on helicopter excursions to look for evidence in the forest. Bezerra said they planned to go out to another outpost, named Toototobi, to question a group of Yanomamis who had arrived near there recently.

Those Indians could have been survivors of the massacre, Bezerra said. They may have removed victims’ bodies and cremated them on their way to Toototobi, at least eight days away by foot. A police team from the Indian agency has found ashes from 10 bonfires on a trail leading toward Toototobi. The ashes contain bone fragments.

Bruce Albert, a French anthropologist, reported to the Indian agency Friday that a group of 69 Yanomamis now in the Toototobi area told him they were survivors of the massacre. Albert’s report said the survivors listed a total of 18 Indians killed.

The killings started with a “conflict” at a mining camp early in July in which five Indians were killed, according to Albert’s information. He quoted Indians as saying that the prospectors later killed 13 men, women and children in a surprise attack on the clan.

Raimundo Cutrim, the federal police official in charge of the investigation, told Brazil’s Globo television network on Saturday that he would question the Indians at Toototobi.

Bezerra has interpreted for police officers questioning two Indian men who said they were witnesses to parts of the massacre. According to Bezerra and police officers, the main outline of what the Indians told them goes like this:

A group of Yanomami men took a hammock from a prospectors’ camp. When six Indians returned two days later asking for food, the prospectors were furious but gave them some rice and manioc flour. On the way home, the Indians were stopping to cook and eat the food when the prospectors attacked them, shooting four to death and wounding another. One Indian escaped unhurt.

Fearing further attacks, the men’s clan moved from its two main lodges at Haximu to a cluster of small huts in the forest, farther away from the prospectors’ camp.

The prospectors reached the huts and opened fire on the clan, killing 20 people, including six women and 12 children. Survivors fled but returned to cremate the bodies on bonfires. They finished, leaving the ashes to cool.

“While they were cooling, the people went to do their crying ritual,” Bezerra said. “That was when the prospectors attacked again.”

A man called Antonio told Bezerra angrily at first that he and two other men who fled were the only survivors of that last attack. Bezerra concluded that a total of 73 Indians had been massacred in the three attacks. The number 73, picked up by news agencies, went around the world.

But on Friday, Bezerra said Antonio later told police that he had fled before the massacre ended and did not know how many had died and how many had survived. Bezerra speculated that the 10 bonfire sites discovered in the jungle were places where survivors cremated the bodies of the dead.

The Yanomamis are the largest nation of tropical forest Indians in South America, with an estimated population of 20,000 on both sides of the Brazilian-Venezuelan border.

At the end of the 1980s, international attention focused on the Yanomamis as an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 prospectors and miners swarmed over the gold-rich Indian lands. The invasion brought cultural disruption, environmental devastation, bloody clashes and illnesses that decimated the Yanomami population.

Repeated government efforts to drive out the invaders have helped. Estimates of the number of miners working Yanomami lands in Brazil range from a few hundred to 1,000.

Many people in Boa Vista resent the Yanomami reservation because it has choked off a source of easy wealth for the city and for Roraima, a territory that became a full-fledged Brazilian state in 1990.

Dredging and placer operations in the beds of rivers and creeks in the Yanomami homelands once sent a rich flow of gold into Boa Vista, the state capital. But with the removal of most prospectors and miners in the last three years, recession has set in. Gold-buying shops no longer bustle with business; prospectors no longer pay for groceries with gold dust.

The boundaries of the Yanomami reservation, an area as big as Portugal, were made official last year. And now, much of Roraima’s richest ranch land is threatened by a project to create a huge Indian reservation for the Makuxi and other tribes in the northern part of the state.

Brazilian military leaders and other nationalists oppose the creation of Indian reservations in border areas. They say Indians could eventually demand independence for their territories, which could then be used by foreign interests to undermine Brazilian sovereignty over the Amazon’s resources.

Some critics of the proposed reservation for the Makuxi and other tribes suspect that the government Indian agency officials and other advocates invented the Yanomami massacre as a means of increasing pressure for an official closing off of the northern lands.

“It’s politically convenient for (the Indian agency) to declare a massacre,” said John Boyle, a British expatriate who lost his gold mining operation in the Yanomami reservation.

Roraima Gov. Ottomar Pinto, a retired air force officer, said the massacre reports are politically motivated.

Even some Yanomami supporters are skeptical about massacre reports, noting that fatal clashes between the Indians and outsiders have been rare. A physician who works with the Indians said they often exaggerate about their fights with neighboring clans.

“They tell about heads chopped off, deaths,” the doctor said. “When we go there, it is nothing serious. They exaggerate a lot.”

As their political clamor continued to grow late last week, investigators pledged to intensify their work.

But Congressman Luciano Pizzato, who made a fact-finding trip to the Yanomami reservation last week, said he and his colleagues could not find facts clear enough to help them reach a conclusion on whether there really was a massacre. “We can’t say there was, nor can we say there was not,” Pizzato said. “Our position obviously is one of caution.”