A while ago, I received a book from the publishing house Jorge Zahar Editor. It is called “Arqueologia da Amazônia” (Archeology of the Amazon Region) and was written by researcher Eduardo Góes Neves. I started reading it yesterday, in the wee hours, and devoured it in one sitting. The book is interesting. It summarizes and contextualizes the archeology of the Amazon region as well as other important information, and it includes all of the countries that comprise the region.

According to the author, one of the purposes of the book is to use historical information to help to solve the region’s occupation problem. After all, unlike many people believe, the Amazon region was heavily populated in the past. Communities from entirely different cultures used to cohabit there. Some of them were agriculture-based or got their food from several sources, like farming or hunting. Others had networks of towns connected by roads while others were traders.

The occupation is ancient… one of the most remote archaeological sites in the region-located in the valley of the Guapore River, State of Mato Grosso-dates from 12,000 BC. We still have a lot to uncover and find out about our country’s past. In addition, we need to prevent the pillage and the smuggling activities that are taking place in the region, possibly on a weekly basis. According to the book, the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (Coiab) is pressuring archeologists and public authorities to protect the area. To find out more and help, I selected some of the facts included in the book. I need to share them:

• The occupation of the Amazon region, both in terms of space and time, was never uniform.
• Contemporary cities such as Santarém, Manaus, Manacapuru and Tefé were built on top of large archaeological sites;
• In the estuary and coastal areas, they identified sites with some of South America’s oldest pottery;
• The languages spoken in the Amazon basin belong to at least four different families: tupi-guarani, arawak, carib and gê. In Europe, for example, with the exception of the languages that were introduced from Africa and Asia, there is only one major linguistic family, the Indo-European;
• The planet’s climate has been changing for thousands of years and so has the Amazon forest. From 10,000 and 8,000 BC, the climate and ecologic conditions in the Amazon region were similar to today’s;
• The indigenous domesticated-a process that preceded farming-a series of plants, such as pineapple, peanut, papaya, cassava and peach-palm. Cassava and peach-palm were probably domesticated where the State of Rondonia is now;
• With the domestication, some plants developed a mutual dependency in relation to human beings. For instance, some varieties of cassava are no longer able to set seeds by themselves so farmers need to break and plant their branches;
• The Amazon soil is poor, but the areas known as “black dirt” are rich in nutrients and very valued by farmers. Archeologists believe that they result from the deposit of organic wastes generated by sedentary tribes thousands of years ago.

Note: Want to learn more about the Amazon region? I recommend the reading of the “A Amazônia não é virgem” and “Cientistas descobrem a idade do rio Amazonas” posts (in Portuguese). The latter was written by me for Blog do Planeta. For even more context, I also recommend the reading of the “Fique em dia com o planeta!” article, published in the iG website.