Unknown Amazon, Culture in nature in ancient Brazil, edited by Colin McEwan, Cristiana Barreto and Eduardo Neves. London, The British Museum Press, 2001, ISBN 071412558X, 304pp.

 Reviewed by Pedro Paulo A. Funari

     Books on the Brazilian archaeology published in English are not common and the exhibition Unknown Amazon in the British Museum offered thus an odd opportunity to produce a fine volume on native Amazonian material culture. The book is written by fifteen scholars, seven of them Brazilian, authors of twelve chapters plus a foreword (pp. 8-13), split between four parts on the economy and subsistence (part one, pp. 26-105), archaeology and society (part two, pp. 106-173), ideology – visual and material culture (part three, pp. 174-229), encounters (part four, pp. 230-286), each part with three chapters.

            In the introduction (pp. 14-19), Eduardo Neves and the other two editors state that as archaeologists, they believe that knowledge about the past has a vital role to play in opening up new perspectives on planning and decision-making for the future, so that the attention paid to the prehistoric past is directly linked to the present day and future interests of people, a main thrust of the whole volume. Presently John Hemming (p. 13) mentions 210  tribes and 350,000 indigenous people in Brazil, occupying 900,000 square kilometres, an area as large as all the core countries of western Europe combined, and I can add the fact that some forty million people in Brazil have some native South American descent, according to recent genetic studies.  The importance thus of native heritage and culture is not to be underestimated.

You can read the entire text on: Public Archaeology, 2, 3, 2002, pp. 188-191.