INTRODUCTION

In honor of Marvin Harris and Bernd Fähmel Beyer Em homenagem a Marvin Harris e Bernd Fähmel Beyer

PREFACE

This book is the result of a partnership between two university archaeologists of the Brazilian Amazon and its spheres of interaction with the Orinoco, Caribbean and Mesoamerica. In 2014, Professor Alexandre Guida Navarro contacted Professor Anna Roosevelt to report on his new archaeological discoveries of the Amazon in the state of Maranhão, the easternmost limit of this great forest. His discoveries reveal an important extension of the archaeological sequence in Lower Amazon estuarine areas beyond Marajo. Roosevelt encouraged him to apply for a Fulbright to come to the U.S, and in 2017 Guida Navarro received a scholarship from the Fulbright Commission to work with Roosevelt at the University of Illinois Chicago, give lectures there about his sites, and travel to the important Amazonian museum collections in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. In 2018, he in turn invited her to São Luís to lecture at the Federal University of Maranhão and go to the Baixada to get to know the new archaeological cultures. After the lecture and site tour, they decided to put together from their lectures a concise, general illustrated educational book about the results of their research in the Lower Amazon to present both the old and new findings on the complex, long-term history of humans in the lower Amazon, for both university researchers in the Human Sciences and Humanities and for the interested public. This book that the reader has in hand was born, thus, from that process of collegial interactions.

INTRODUCTION

This book is about the antiquity, complexity, and diversity of Amazonian indigenous culture. Research by anthropologists, geographers, and historians has uncovered a long and glorious sequence of indigenous cultures going back as many as 13,000 calendar years. Cultures change greatly through this time and they differ very much from region to region. Nonetheless, the sequence is divided by three great and coherent horizon styles that spread over many regions during their time. Though not named until later in the 20th century, the styles of the Formative Saladoid-Barrancoid Horizon, the Polychrome Horizon, and the Incised and Punctate Horizon were recognized by the early scholars. The time-depth and elaboration of the cultures was in fact recognized long ago by nineteenth and early twentieth century Brazilian, North American, and Canadian scholars (Derby, Goeldi, Hartt, Netto, Nimuendaju, Penna, Wallace, and others). Wallace and Hartt recognized then that there had been early hunting and gathering societies in the Ice Age, who created finely flaked stone tools and monumental rock paintings. Hartt and Penna saw that there had been sedentary pottery-using fishing/shellfishing cultures early in the modern climate period, who left behind great middens of shellfish, fishbones, and sherds. Goeldi, Hartt and his students, and also Netto realized that later on in prehistory there were prosperous sedentary societies who created numerous artificial earth mounds and monumental anthropomorphic pottery effigies with elaborate modeled, incised, and painted decoration. And Nimuendaju’s archaeological explorations along the banks and islands of the lower Amazon uncovered a wealth of evidence for a wealthy and warlike series of cultures who

made abundant modeled, incised, and painted pottery and carved gemstones at the time of first contact with Europeans. These early scholars and even earlier observers had also noted interesting and unusual aspects of the social organization of the ancients. Both Hartt and Wallace noticed that the early rock paintings seemed oriented to worship of the sun. Most of the scholars recognized the importance of animal and human images in the art, and Netto especially noted the predominance of female images in the images of the ancient moundbuilding societies of the lower Amazon, where early explorers and missionaries like Carvajal, Fritz, and Bettendorf noted the importance of women rulers and deities among the populous and warlike societies they encountered along the mainstream Amazon.

However, by the middle of the 20th century, Meggers and Evans, North American scholars doing research in South America, pursued a different view. They argued that the hot humid tropical forest had severely limited the native cultural development in Amazonia. They felt that indigenous human occupation had been limited mostly to a late prehistoric cultural adaptation of shifting village societies living by slashand-burn cultivation and hunting and gathering. Though they recognized the magnitude of the late prehistoric Polychrome Horizon mound-building culture at the mouth of the Amazon, where they did their dissertations, they attributed it to an invasion from the Andean civilizations, a short-lived culture, doomed to fail in the tropical forest conditions. This new view was opposed by some researchers, especially Lathrap and his students, who recognized the greater length and complexity of the prehistoric human occupation than that hypothesized by Meggers and Evans, but modern scientific research in the Amazon was still quite limited, so it was not clear in the debate whose view was closer to what happened in prehistory. By the force of serendipity and the openness of Brazilian institutions for new research, the field of archaeological research in the Amazon had opened up by 1980, when Roosevelt came in. The museum collections and writings of the nineteenth and early 20th century scholars were an important inspiration to her and she proposed field research there to investigate the nature and age of different cultures during prehistory. Working with Brazilian and US collaborators and students and grants from agencies in both countries, she was able to carry out successive seasons of field research to find out about the panorama of cultures that had developed in the lower Amazon. The research quickly showed that the cultures were not just one tropical forest culture but many different ones over space and time. All the cultures showed continuity with earlier ones, but there were distinctive regional cultures with their own versions of art, technology, and ecological adaptation, and we detail these cultures in our book. Guida Navarro’s entry into the field in 2013 led to the definition of a new one of those distinctive regional cultures, the stilt-village culture.