BRAZILIAN ARCHAEOLOGY: A REAPPRAISAL

Pedro Paulo A. Funari (UNICAMP, Brazil)

 1. INTRODUCTION

 

            Brazilian archaeology is still largely ignored inside the country and abroad and even within the academic world it is probably perceived  as an ancillary discipline dealing with the remote past.  For ordinary people, archaeology if anything is an adventurous practice to be carried out in Egypt or elsewhere but not in Brazil, as we lack piramids and other interesting remains. Prehistoric archaeology, in so far as it is concerned with native Americans, is usually dismissed as an unecessary  search for the barbarians, uncivilized Indians.  The only exception is the case of the attention paid by the media, and as a side effect by the people, to  the earliest human remains discovered in the country. Even in that case though, the interest is not directly related to the Archaeological evidence or field research but to the possible primacy of Brazil in that respect.  Inside academia,  for its part, Archaeology is still considered as a maid to History: it can provide  incidental illustrations of events known from contemporary documents in historical periods and collect prehistoric artefacts. In both cases tough, the analysis should be left to Historians or Anthorpologists.

 

            The first goal of this paper is to explain  how the history of Archaeology in Brazil explains the way it is perceived by ordinary people and scholars in Brazil and abroad. The only way to understand the development of Archaeology in Brazil is to study the ralationship between the society and its changes and the scientific practice. Although there are some studies of the History of the field in the country (Mendon‡a 1991), there is no explicit study of the relations between the social and political changes and the resulting transformations in Archaeology.  The first goal of this article is thus  to provide a social interpretation of Brazilian Archaeology.  Although there are now thousands of papers already published on archaeological fieldwork (cf. Prous 1991:577), the overwhelming majority of works are merely descriptive in character.  This is explained by the history of the country and of the discipline and by the establishment of an archaeological structure controlling by and large the field in Brazil. I have chosen three subjects as representative examples  of Brazilian prehistorical archaeology and its characteristics: the antiquity of man in Brazil, the ecological approach and its recent challenges and rock art studies. Two unconventional approaches are used as examples  of how archaeology has been developing in relation to historical periods and its uses in Education. Finally, there is a sketch of theoretical trends and I conclude  assessing the perspectives of Archaeology in Brazil.

 

            Brazil is the largest country in South America, its 3,286,476 square miles (8,511,965 square kms) representing four fifths of the territory of Europe, being thus larger than the continous 48 United States states (MAP 1).  Brazil's Atlantic coastline streches 4,603 miles (7,408 km), almost the entire country has a tropical or semitropical climate. In the North, there is the heavily-wooded Amazon basin covering half the country; the Northeast region is semiarid scrubland; a large savannah (serrado) area streches to the South. From S†o Paulo State to the South  there is a semitropical vegetation up to the Pampa in Rio Grande do Sul State. Nowadays, the country has a population of more than 150 million, 76% living in towns and cities as large as S†o Paulo (17 million) and Rio de Janeiro (12 million). Although the gross national product of Brazil is a large one (250 US$ billion), with non-agricultural production representing almost 90% of its GNP, its per capita income is only US$ 1,700. Brazilian History has been a violent one, "the conquest has thus produced a deeply divided culture, the violence between victors and vanquished characterising from sexual matings to collective representations. This is a strongly male culture, racist and highly verbalized in character. The conquest was carried out by he-men, navigators, conquerors, soldiers, settlers, priests, bandeirantes (frontiersmen), sugar planters. These assaulters used naked force, untied from any constraint, exerting arbitrary power" (Teles 1989:75;73). It is in this complex context that Brazilian Archaeology, its history, key subjects and theoretical trends must be understood.

You can read the entire text in:

Brazilian archaeology, a reappraisal, in G. Politis & Benjamin Alberti (eds), Archaeology in Latin America, London & New York, Routledge, 17-37, 1999.