Twe nty ye a rs of Ama zonia n a rc ha e olog y in Bra zil

by Eduardo Goes Neves

A large part of the archaeology in the Brazilian Amazon remains rooted in the deterministic,
possibilistic or monocausal influences first presented in the Handbook of South American
Indians. Research undertaken from 1977 to 1997 has tried to move away from this theme. Several
researchers have focused on the interaction between inhabitants of the Amazon and their
environment as well as ethnographic analogies.
C O PYRIG HT 1998 Antiq uity Pub lic a tions, Ltd .
This paper presents a brief overview of Amazonian
archaeology in Brazil in the last two decades, a fitting span
since 1997 marked the 20th anniversary of the
PRONAPABA - Programa Nacional de Pesquisas
Arqueologicas na Bacia Amazonica - created by Clifford
Evans, Betty Meggers and Mario Simoes with the
co-operation of several Brazilian archaeologists.
In contemporary archaeology of the Brazilian Amazon,
rapidly increased knowledge about the early pre-ceramic
and ceramic occupation has not been matched by an
understanding of the socio-political dynamics of native
Amazonian societies during the last two millennia, notably
immediately before the 15th century AD.
This state of affairs arises from long-held ideas that can be
traced back to Lowies and Stewards discussion of the
concept of tropical forest cultures (TFC) in the Handbook
of South American Indians (Lowie 1948; Steward 1948).
TFC were defined by comparison to the politically
centralized societies of the Central Andes, as much by a
lack of cultural traits as by a presence. TFC were
characterized by a curious blend of adaptive traits, such as
root cultivation or the use of river craft, and also by the
manufacture of pottery, hardly an exclusive prerogative
(Myers 1973: 24). Lowie laid focus on the importance of
watercraft and navigation, a fact supposed to account for
the apparent homogeneity of TFC over the Amazon and
parts of the Brazilian lowlands. From that seed has grown
a sacred axiom - even without much empirical data - of
Amazonian archaeology: the distinction between
floodplain, varzea, and hinterland terra firme societies.
More important, this picture contributed to what the
Brazilian archaeologist E. Viveiros de Castro (1996) has
called the standard model for TFC: the perception of
these societies as small, isolated and autonomous
communities with decentralized political organization.
The standard model has been going through a slow and
unpainful death among cultural anthropologists - thanks to
developments in ethnohistory, ecology and what has been
called historical ecology (Balee 1994). This paper
discusses advances and limitations in archaeology over
the last 20 years that have (or have not) contributed to
criticism of the standard model. I address works of three
different groups of influential archaeologists: Betty
Meggers and her Brazilian colleagues; Donald Lathrap and
his students; and Anna Roosevelt. I start with Lathraps
work, which I consider the longest-available criticism of the
standard model presented by an Amazonian
archaeologist.
Lathrap: tropical forest as lost paradise
Lathrap realized that similar ceramic complexes of the
Amazon and of northern South America were being
analytically separated by different classification
procedures. His truly integrated continental perspective for
South American archaeology came from his general
hypothesis that the tropical forest alluvial floodplains were
a major centre of cultural development in the Americas at
the outset of the Formative. He suggested (Lathrap 1973a;
1973b; 1974), for instance, that the earliest ceramic
complexes of the Americas should be found in the
floodplains of the central Amazon (Lathrap 1974), a direct
critique of Evans et al.s (1965) transpacific hypothesis for
the development of Early Valdivia ceramics. Boldly,
Lathrap proposed that all aboriginal systems of food
production in the New World originated from an ancient
system of cultivation of bitter manioc centred on the
alluvial floodplains of the Amazon and northern South
America (1977). Crucial to this discussion is the concept of
house garden, with the slow management of plants
transplanted from the forests to areas around villages. This
model also assumes that the alluvial floodplains would
provide a constant and reliable supply of aquatic animal
protein.
Recent evidence supports some of these ideas, which
seemed implausible at the time. Roosevelts (1995;
Roosevelt et al. 1991; 1996) data from the lower Amazon
shows Late Pleistocene occupations and the oldest dates
for ceramics in the Americas. House-garden type plant
management is ethnographically documented among a
number of Amazonian societies, most notably the Kaapor,
an eastern Amazonian TupiGuarani group (Balee 1994).
In The Upper Amazon Lathrap (1970a: 68-83) presented a
general hypothesis for the lowland distribution of native
indigenous languages by which the two most widespread
linguistic stocks of the lowlands, the Arawakan and the
Tupian, had a common origin in the central Amazonian
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floodplain around 5000 BP. Lathrap arrived at the idea by
reinterpreting Nobles (1965) study of Proto-Arawakan and
by analysing the distribution of the ceramic complexes
then known in the lowlands. This general model prompted
two wide-ranging doctoral dissertations that addressed it
with archaeological and linguistic data (Brochado 1984;
Oliver 1989).
Brochados work, which remains unpublished, offered a
general model to explain the diffusion of pottery over
eastern South America. Still a source of debate, it
suggests that both the Tupinanba and Guarani groups -
which settled on the whole Atlantic shore and in the interior
of southern Brazil at the beginning of the 16th century AD -
descended from proto-Tupian speakers originating from
the central Amazon. In a polemical conclusion, Brochado
proposes that the mound-building societies which settled
in Marajo Island in the 4th-13th centuries AD were
ancestors of the Tupinamba. The testing of this hypothesis
requires a detailed survey of an immense area of the
Brazilian shore eastwards of the Amazons mouth.
In his masters thesis (1980), Brochado presents a model
of intensive cultivation of seed- and root-crops able to
support the mound-building societies of eastern Marajo
Island over several hundred years. Radar images from
eastern Marajo indicate a topography of natural ridges and
swales not unlike the artificial ditches and causeways
found in so many other parts of lowland South America
such as the Llanos de Mojos (Denevan 1966; Erikson
1995); the French Guiana shore (Rostain 1988); the
Guayas Basin in Ecuador; and the San Jorge Basin in
Columbia. This hypothesis has not been systematically
tested.
Jose Olivers doctoral dissertation can be seen as a mirror
of Brochados: a model for the expansion of Arawakan
populations out of the central Amazon into northern South
America. Both Oliver and Brochado see these complexes
developing from an Ancient Amazonian Polychrome
Tradition (APT) in the central Amazon 6000-4000 BP
(Brochado & Lathrap 1982; Oliver 1989: 487). Such a
ceramic tradition has not, however, been identified in the
Amazon Basin. Lathrap & Oliver (1987) have suggested
that the polychrome sherds dated to 5700 BP from the
Aguerito site, at the confluence of the Orenoco and Apure,
well into Venezuela, are the earliest direct evidence of the
APT out of the central Amazon. However, work being done
in the lower Negro basin in the central Amazon
(Heckenberger et al. 1997) and in the upper Negro basin,
halfway between the central Amazon and the Orinoco
(Neves 1997), has produced much later dates, around the
end of the 1st millennium AD, for the appearance of
polychrome ceramics. Likewise, Mario Simoes work in the
lower and upper Rio Negro (Simoes 1974; Simoes &
Kalkmann 1987) has yielded fairly late dates, around the
9th century AD, for the advent of polychrome ceramics
associated with the Guarita phase defined by Peter Hilbert
(1968). If such evidence, still very preliminary, is
confirmed, elements of Lathraps, Brochados and Olivers
hypotheses will have to be reviewed. These scholars are,
however, to be commended for their eagerness to tackle
the problematic but unavoidable issue of correlating
language with material culture in Amazonian archaeology.
Meggers: the tropical forest as a counterfeit paradise
Betty Meggers, staunch supporter of the standard model,
has reconstituted Amazonian cultural history on a blend of
monocausal environmental possibilism and diffusionism
since the 1950s, modifying some perspectives along the
way. Indeed, it has been such willingness to modify ideas
that makes it hard to overlook the arguments, even if
Meggers has not done systematic fieldwork in the Amazon
for more than 40 years. In the last two decades Meggers
contributions fall into three main categories:
* attempts to correlate palaeoclimatic data with the
archaeological record of Amazonia;
* attempts to indicate the relevance of the analytical
methods she has employed since the 1950s;
* and attempts to evaluate critically the demographic
estimates for native Amazonians derived from early
Colonial chronicles.
In response to Lathraps model (1970a), Meggers (1977;
1979; 1982; 1987) has explained language dispersal in the
lowlands by relating it to the theory of forested refuges, a
model created by zoologists to account for the
discontinuous pattern of species distribution of Amazonia
through Pleistocene episodes of tropical aridity correlated
to the higher-latitude glaciations. The identification of at
least two drier Holocene episodes prompted Meggers to
suggest that those conditions would have opened free
corridors for the expansion of Proto-Arawakan and
Proto-Tupian speaking groups out of western Amazonian
homelands into central Amazonia. The problem with such
a hypothesis is that Meggers herself had initially shown
great reluctance in establishing correlations between
language and material culture. Consequently, she was
unable to test them.
In the same way, Meggers has supposed a diffusion of
early ceramics out of western (1979: 256) or northwestern
(1987: 161) South America into the Amazon, where there
were at that time no early dates for pottery. Roosevelts
recent evidence (1995; Roosevelt et al. 1991; 1996) of
ceramics at c. 8000 b.p. in the lower Amazon, at
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Taperinha shell-mound and Pedra Pintada cave,
contradicts this, since those are the earliest ceramics on
the continent.
In later publications, Meggers has distanced herself from
explanations based on the refuge theory (Meggers 1992b;
1993-95; 1995; Meggers & Danon 1988), while retaining
her focus on Holocene environmental change as a major
limiting factor in Amazonia. For instance, in a
reinterpretation of the Marajo Island sequence (Meggers &
Danon 1988), it has been suggested that gaps between
the latest TL date for the Mangueiras phase (2870[+ or
-]190) and the earliest available TL date for the Formiga
phase (1940[+ or -]230) that could be correlated with an
arid interval, inferred from pollen data from Marajo and
elsewhere from c. 2800 to 2000 b.p. This interpretation is
extended to explain gaps in other sequences around the
same interval from such varied areas as: Llanos de Mojos
(Bolivian Amazon), Lago de Silves/Lower Uatuma (central
Amazon), lower Xingu (lower Amazon) (Meggers 1995:
31). These gaps Meggers interprets as responses to arid
intervals generated by El Nino-Southern Oscillation
phenomena on the west coast of South America. Yet these
episodes were of short duration: how could those be
correlated with gaps hundreds of years long in the
archaeological record of areas hundreds of miles away?
Even if population dispersal is involved, the regions into
which these populations emigrated remain unidentified.
Meggers has constantly, albeit in a selective fashion,
found in PRONAPABA data supposedly evidence of the
short span and low density of pre-colonial Amazonian
settlements (Meggers 1990; 1991; 1992b; 1993-95; 1995;
Meggers et al. 1988; Miller et al. 1992). Evidence already
presented by Hilbert (1968) of very large archaeological
sites associated with black earth and a high density of
ceramic remains along the middle and lower Amazon, is
explained by Meggers as resulting from several short-term
occupations rather than from dense, long-term
occupations, a point consistently made with the same
case-studies (Meggers 1995; Miller et al. 1992): these
large sites are excavated by artificial levels in small
test-pits; relative chronologies are established with
ceramic seriations; temper is the trait defining the phases.
Departing from her initial use of the concept (Meggers &
Evans 1957), Meggers now sees a phase as the actual
correlate of a prehistoric community (Meggers 1990; 1991;
1992b; 1993-95; 1995; Meggers & Evans 1980): when the
same phases cannot be correlated at the same
stratigraphic levels of small excavations at the same sites,
levels are taken to represent different occupations by
different communities.
There are several problems with the above reasoning: it
overlooks intrasite artefact variability at the same
occupation levels; it has the questionable premise that
temper is a universal indicator of cultural affiliations; it
bases its conclusions on samples of small size without
apparent control; and it ignores the fact that in the tropical
forests a number of natural and anthropic factors are
actively involved in mixing up archaeological occupation
levels (DeBoer & Lathrap 1979; Roosevelt 1991
FORMIGAS; DeBoer et al. 1991). Even if one accepts the
logic of Meggers argument, it is difficult to evaluate it
independently, since no excavation profiles, or the actual
artefact composition of each level are presented. One has
to await the full publication of the PRONAPABA reports.
Meggers use of the concept of phase has enabled her to
present models for processes of village fissioning, in cases
when data from more than one site in a given area are
available. These reconstitutions are then compared with
data obtained from contemporary groups such as the
Kayapo, Akawaio or the Jivaro (Meggers 199395; 1995) in
order to test for their soundness. Such a use of
ethnographic analogies, already criticized by Roosevelt
(1989), has several problems: the Kayapo are hardly a
traditional Amazonian Indigenous population (Verswijer
1992: 337), being a formerly central Brazilian population
that expanded into southern Amazonia in the last 200
years or so. The Akawaio likewise are a population settled
in headwater areas in the Guiana Plateau whose
settlement patterns should not be used to explain
processes of occupation in areas in the lower Amazon as
Meggers has done.
Attachment to these ideas has prevented Meggers from
paying due attention to the data recovered by her own
Brazilian colleagues in recent years. Eurico Millers (Miller
et al. 1992) research in Rondonia has uncovered
preliminary evidence of continuous human occupation in
the area dating from 8320[+ or -]100 b.p. (Itapipoca Phase)
to the contact period, probably one of the longest
documented sequences in the whole Amazon. These
interesting data have been ignored by Meggers in her
latest discussions of Amazonian archaeology (Meggers
1993-95; 1995).
It would be wrong, however, to dismiss the continuing
strength of Meggers ideas. As with Lathraps, some of her
hypotheses still await careful testing. The problem of
correlating site size and community size is foremost: the
criticism presented here should not obscure the fact that,
archaeologically, this is still an open question in
Amazonian archaeology.
Roosevelt: a synthesis on the way?
Anna Roosevelts becoming in latter years the most visible
Amazonist archaeologist is due, at least partially, to her
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research on early ceramic production in the lower Amazon.
Roosevelts work can be divided into three categories:
* research on Early Ceramic and Palaeoindian sites
(Roosevelt 1995; Roosevelt et al. 1991; 1996)
* research in what she suggests to be chiefdom-related
sites on the lower Amazon (Roosevelt 1989b; 1991a);
* theory and practice of Amazonian archaeology
(Roosevelt 1987; 1989; 1992).
At the early ceramic and pre-ceramic sites of Taperinha
shell-mound and Pedra Pintada cave, Roosevelt has
brought a deeper chronology to Amazonian archaeology.
True, early ceramics c. 5000 BP had been uncovered by
the late Mario Simoes (1981) at the shell-mounds of the
Atlantic shore east of the mouth of the Amazon; Simoes
and Meggers, not at ease, discarded some of the early
radiocarbon dates (Roosevelt 1995). Roosevelts research
has placed with certainty the beginnings of ceramic
production in the lower Amazon into the 8th millennium
b.p., consistent with Lathraps (1974) ideas on early
pottery in the Americas. However, the few published
sherds from Taperinha and Pedra Pintada seem to be
different from the Ancient Amazon Polychrome Tradition
envisioned by Lathrap, Brochado and Oliver (Brochado &
Lathrap 1982; Lathrap & Oliver 1987).
Before the work in Pedra Pintada, early preceramic
occupation had been dated to the 8th millennium in
contract research in different areas of Amazonia - such as
the Gaviao cave in the Caraja hills (Magalhaes 1993;
1994) and the Jamari river at the Madeira basin (Miller et
al. 1992), but those works did not receive wide recognition,
because they were not published in detail and, worse for
many, were mostly in Portuguese. Roosevelt, confirming
that earlier pattern and bringing solid evidence of early
preceramic occupation, pushed the chronology for
Amazonia back to the 11th millennium b.p.; Pedra Pintada
is the best-dated site in Amazonia, or even in South
America, with over 50 dates determined by different
techniques. Although none of the collections of these sites
has yet been published in detail, a cursory comparison of
the available data shows that the lithic industries are
different from each other. Roosevelts work with early
preceramic sites has also indicated hunter-gatherer
occupations in a tropical rainforest setting, contrary to the
suggestion of authors working outside Amazonia
(Headland & Bailey 1991). Indeed, recent
ethno-archaological research among the Nukak, a
hunter-gatherer group of the Colombian Amazon has also
attested to this (Politis 1996).
Roosevelts work on the earth mounds of Marajo Island
(1991a) re-evaluated Meggers & Evanss (1957) sequence
of the Marajoara phase with geophysical remote sensing
and - for the first time in the Brazilian Amazon - recovery of
microbotanical remains. Where Meggers & Evans (1957)
reconstituted the Marajoara phase as a complex
chiefdom-like society that emigrated from somewhere else
and decayed in the poor environment of Marajo Island,
Roosevelts working hypothesis had the polychrome
ceramics and earth mounds as the record of a powerful
and locally developed chiefdom.
Depending on historical data from early chroniclers and on
previous archaeological work, Roosevelt anticipated the
following for the Marajoara and other Amazonian
chiefdoms: location along floodplains; political
concentration of large territories, sometimes with tens of
thousands of square kilometres; expansionist warfare;
hierarchical social organization; tribute; intensive
agriculture and exploration of aquatic fauna; sophisticated
crafts, exemplified by polychrome and incised punctate
ceramics; increase of human-based iconography in vessel
decoration (mostly in Marajo); extensive trade; funerary
urns, idols and death cults; large population aggregates
along the floodplains, with settlements occupied by several
thousand people; earthworks - mound-building, raised
fields, causeways - for water control, agriculture,
habitation, transport and defence (Roosevelt 1992a: 71).
However, the archaeological data generated by the Marajo
project do not bring unambiguous evidence to support this
scenario, since the characterization of Marajoara society
presented by Roosevelt results as much from her actual
archaeological fieldwork at the Teso dos Bichos mound as
from early historical chronicles, general cross-cultural
studies, previous archaeological research in Marajo and
ethnographic data.
In a previous hypothesis, Roosevelt has correlated
population growth with maize cultivation in the Parmane
area of the Middle Orenoco (1980). Yet the massive
preliminary report from Teso dos Bichos mound (1991a)
does not show conclusive evidence of intensive cultivation
of maize, or even of maize being a major staple in Marajo
during the 900-year span, 4th-13th centuries AD, of the
Marajoara phase (see also Roosevelt 1992: 76). Today, at
least in the eastern part of the Amazon basin, maize is
cultivated by fairly mobile societies under stress due to
encroachment of their lands by the advancing western
frontier (Balee 1994). This contradicts Roosevelts (1992:
76) suggestion that the widespread common pattern of
manioc cultivation by native Amazonians is a return to an
ancient, pre-chiefdom type pattern. These data, together
with the results from Roosevelts research, indicate that
one should not assume, a priori, a positive correlation
between maize cultivation and the development of
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complex forms of political organization in the Amazon.
Roosevelts hypothetical reconstitution of the Marajoara
society relies heavily on ethnographic analogies, a
procedure she has criticized herself {Roosevelt 1989).
Thus, her population estimates for the longhouse village
she identified at Teso dos Bichos are as follows [Roosevelt
1989: 289):
from an analogy of present-day Amazonian stove sites,
each Marajoara stove could have furnished the needs of
one nuclear family, because there was room in each stove
for at least 3 large vessels . . . In Amazonia, nuclear
families average 4 people . . . Thus, each stove can be
expected to have furnished the needs of 3 to 5 people. If
each group of contemporary hearths had 6 to 12 or more
individual ones in it, as estimated by the geophysicists . . .
then each group may represent a range of 35 to 60
people, or an average of 50 people . . ., then this would be
the average population of a longhouse at the site.
Multiplying the number of inhabitants per house by the
number of houses - 20 - at Teso dos Bichos, provides the
figure of 1000 inhabitants for a given occupation period
(Roosevelt 1991a: 342).
These figures are not unreasonable. Andre Prous (1992:
481) estimated 2000 inhabitants for the Camnutins mound
group, also in Eastern Marajo, by reanalysing primary data
of Meggers & Evans (1957). Yet should large population
aggregates alone prove a chiefdom? Documented and
estimated population figures for villages in the tribal
societies in central and eastern Brazil also yield a figure of
1000 or more (Wust 1994). To give just one example, the
Tupinamba of eastern Brazil lived in villages with 4-8
longhouses and populations from 500 up to 2000 or 3000
(Fausto 1992: 384).
On the other hand, Roosevelts figures for Marajo assume
contemporaneity of the houses occupation, which is very
plausible, but not yet archaeologically established.
Although the size of the area excavated at Teso dos
Bichos surpasses any other field study done in Amazonia
until the present, it is still not adequate to uncover
community patterns.
It is also crucial to discover whether the mounds were built
in short-term episodes, or resulted from slow aggregation
due to continuous re-occupation. Mound-building episodes
have been detected mainly in profiles at the mound
periphery (Roosevelt 1991a: 312). The excavations did not
find much from occupations before the Pacoval Subphase
when, it seems, mound-building was undertaken to provide
retaining walls or supporting platforms. Thus, the mounds
did not seem to have been necessarily defensive or
ceremonial (Roosevelt 1991a: 333). Given the length of
the Pacoval Subphase, mound-building can be seen then
as a normal activity to prevent the mound collapsing in an
environment that remains flooded for a good part of the
year.
Mound-building alone need not be a correlate of deeply
stratified society. Along the Para State shore, not far from
Marajo Island, and in many areas of southern Brazil,
hundreds of shell-mounds have been identified and some
excavated (Prous 1992: 199-265). Some of these are
large: the now-destroyed Garopaba, in southern Santa
Catarina, is estimated to have been 400x100 m at the
base and 30 m high (Prous 1992: 207). Yet nobody has
suggested the mounds to be correlated to mid-Holocene
chiefdoms. The presence of monumental structures does
not of itself tell much about social and political structures;
instead it is the elucidation of the labour mobilization
involved in their construction that can do that (Kristiansen
1991: 22).
In the end, it seems that, regardless of the differences
among their cultural historical models, Roosevelt employs
the same heuristic concepts - rooted in one way or another
in some form of ecological determinism - as those
previously employed by Meggers and Lathrap in their
explanations. Consequently, one sees in her work the
recurrence of the distinction between flood-plain and
hinterland environments as a device to explain social
processes (Roosevelt 1991a) or an emphasis on soil
fertility as a limiting factor for social complexification in
Amazonia (Roosevelt 1991a; 1991b; 1992). Roosevelts
thinking seems closer to Meggers than to Lathraps, since
the latter has consistently focused on animal protein as the
crucial variable explaining population growth and social
complexification in Amazonia, although Roosevelt seems
to accept the premise that floodplains were major settings
for social complexification in pre-colonial Amazonia. Thus,
while Meggers has a more possibilistic perspective, since
she does not see the environment as a force stimulating
social complexification, Roosevelt sees a positive
correlation between soil fertility, cultivation patterns and
social complexification.
Conclusion
This review shows how Amazonian archaeology for the
most part remains under the intellectual influence of the
concepts first presented in the Handbook of South
American Indians. Ecological explanations - deterministic,
possibilistic or monocausal - remain important tools in
explaining socio-cultural dynamics in pre-colonial
Amazonia. The major exception here is Lathraps (1977)
ground-breaking concept of house garden. This concept
implies a degree of interaction between native
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Amazonians and their surrounding environment not
contemplated by either the deterministic theories or the
accepted view of the Amazon as a pristine forest
(Denevan 1992b; Stahl 1996). Another way out of such a
problem can also be found in Denevans (1996) bluff
model for settlement location which contemplates the
combined use of varzea and terra firme resources.
Roosevelts (1989) well-reasoned call for more careful
uses of ethnographic analogies opens new avenues for
research. If it is true that the European conquest has
brought a major demographic reduction and deep
transformations of the patterns of social and economic
organization of pre-colonial indigenous Amazonian
societies (Denevan 1992a), such impact was not uniform
over the area. It is then up to archaeologists to use
archaeology as a source for indigenous history to
understand the historical trajectories of native American
societies.
Two recent works with regional focuses have been moving
in such a direction: Heckenbergers (1996) and Neves
(1998) works have used archaeology to elucidate the
development of two different multi-ethnic regional systems
at the periphery of the Amazon: those, respectively, of the
Upper Xingu and Upper Rio Negro Basins. The results of
these works indicate very different histories. In the Upper
Negro the archaeological sites, dating back to the 3rd
millennium b.p., are consistently small, which fits the
ethnographic pattern (Neves 1998), while in the Upper
Xingu the archaeological sites are many times larger than
the contemporary indigenous villages. Those studies
show, then, that the impact of the conquest has been
different, although intense, in those different areas.
It is by working as the major source for understanding
these different historical processes which sometimes date
back to more than 10,000 years ago that archaeology can
make its major and unique contribution to Amazonian
anthropology.
Acknowledgements. This paper benefitted from the
comments, encouragement and criticism of Renato Kipnis,
Irmhild Wrist, Jeff Parsons, Clark Erickson and the
reviewers front Antiquity. To them, my appreciation.
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