"Um Lugar dos Antigos:" A Tiered Approach to Community-Driven Survey in Cultural Palimpsests of the Brazilian Amazon.

Summary

The Mouth of the Xingu River, on the Lower Amazon River, is a place of many histories. The edge of the Amazon Delta, it was the first Portuguese foothold in contemporary Northern Brazil, and later home to a "glorious" 19th-Century rubber boomtown. Centered on the city of Gurupá, the region was a major hub in the traffic of Amerindians and also marked the Western extent of African slaving networks in Luso-Amazonia. Part of the Cabanagem revolt, place of Amazonian Jewry, export center for forest products, and locus of labor struggles, Gurupá appears in travel documents as early as 1595. But the history of the place itself is largely unknown.

Survey conducted during ethnographic fieldwork among descendant Maroon communities in the municipality of Gurupá reveals that this complex history manifests in material and immaterial forms. I present results from guided tours through three territories, in which local teachers and community members presented known and unknown "places of the old ones" that structure their lives, memories and histories. Using a GPS, trowel, soil probe, and notebooks, I attempted to map the places and stories onto Cartesian coordinate grids. Gurupá emerges as a multidimensional place of historical, cultural, political, and social intersection.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16043