Torrent Pro Landscape Version 18 Itarar
Evagret Homestead
The Urubici region, located on the highland plateau, is a landscape dominate by the Highlands Grasslands (or Campos) and the Araucaria Forest. The climate is humid throughout the year with warm temperatures during the summer (max. 30C) and cold in the winter (min. -7C) with occasional snowfall. The headwaters of the streams irrigating this region begin in wetland areas with shallow and rocky soils at around 1800 masl and descend rapidly through incised valleys forested by Araucaria, eventually flowing into the Canoas River, which meanders through the middle of an unusually wide and flat valley with fertile soils at around 1000 masl.
Newly created academic programs at Brazilian universities have provided the impetus for new archaeological projects in southeastern South America during the last two decades. The new data are changing our views on emergent social complexity, natural and human-induced transformation of the landscape, and transcontinental expansions and cultural interactions across the Río de la Plata basin during the Middle and Late Holocene. We concentrate on six major archaeological traditions/regions: the Sambaquis, the Pantanal, the Constructores de Cerritos, the Tupiguarani, the Southern Proto-Jê, and the middle and lower Paraná River. Diverse and autonomous complex developments exhibit distinct built landscapes in a region previously thought of as marginal compared with cultural developments in the Andes or Mesoamerica. The trajectories toward increased sociopolitical complexity flourished in very different and changing environmental conditions. While some groups were pushed to wetland areas during a drier mid-Holocene, others took advantage of the more humid Late Holocene climate to intensively manage Araucaria forests. The start of the second millennium AD was a critical period marked by an increased number of archaeological sites, the construction of ceremonial architecture, and the intensification of landscape transformation; it also was marked by the rapid expansion of influences from outside the La Plata basin. The Amazonian Tupiguarani and Arawak newcomers brought with them significant changes in technologies and social and political structures, as well as novel landscape management practices.
Long viewed as a marginal area compared to the Andes and the Circum-Caribbean (Meggers and Evans 1978; Steward and Faron 1959), we are learning that this region had an early sequence of cultural trajectories contemporaneous with the first urban societies in the Andes and the rise of the Amazonian Formative (e.g., Burger 1995; Dillehay 2014; Heckenberger and Neves 2009). During the last two decades, the archaeology of this region has received new energy through the development of several archaeological projects at national universities in Brazil (e.g., López Mazz 1999) and the arrival of land development-funded archaeology (e.g., Copé 2007; DeMasi 2006). A large portion of the original work reported in this article appears in unpublished theses, completed mainly in Brazilian universities. This renewed archaeological research, combined with new conceptual and methodological advances, allows us to discuss in detail issues relating to the emergence of social complexity, the scale and nature of past human impact on these landscapes, and the role of regional interaction networks in a way that was not possible before.
We begin with an overview of recent developments in the Middle and Late Holocene archaeology of the region, followed by a discussion of how these new data are changing our views on the emergence of social complexity, the transformation of landscapes, migrations, and the establishment of interaction spheres during the Late Holocene. The introductory sections present the diverse environments and a summary of the Middle and Late Holocene archaeological cultures of the region (Fig. 1). In the following thematic sections, we present key findings and emerging research agendas for each archaeological culture. Finally, we summarize the major new findings and briefly discuss the main thematic concerns in the context of South America. We focus on major trends without intending to provide a complete overview of all recent excavations or interpretations. Not included in our review are the archaeology of Paraguay and large parts of the Gran Chaco and the archaeology of mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers. Similarly, we highlight major historical trends in each particular section but do not produce a detailed account of the history of archaeological investigations in each region (see López Mazz 1999; Noelli 2005; Politis 2003).
Many of these new approaches concentrate on more particular historical developments (e.g., Pauketat 2001) and incorporate the concepts of practice (Bourdieu 1977) and structure (Giddens 1979) into their interpretations of specific historical trajectories. At the same time, aspects relating to the perception, memory, ideology, and underlying structural principles and meanings of Early Formative landscapes are taken into account (e.g., Ashmore and Knapp 1999; Barrett 1996; Bradley 1998; Dillehay 2007; De Boer 1997; Edmond 1999; Feinman 1999; Iriarte et al. 2013; Thomas 1999; Tilley 1995); several authors have emphasized the importance of the landscape as a means of encapsulating and transmitting historical memory (e.g., Bender 1993, 2002; Criado Boado et al. 2006; Santos-Granero 1998, 2004).
Regional studies have been especially fruitful in enlightening the social landscapes of the Sambaqui builders of the Atlantic Coast. Recent research, focused on an area of roughly 692 km2 on the southern coast of Santa Catarina, around the Santa Marta Cape, has investigated the joint evolution of the landscape and the nature of the Sambaqui occupation (DeBlasis et al. 2007; Kneip 2004). Sambaqui builders have been settled around a bay/lagoon system for at least six millennia, with a considerable demographic expansion between approximately 5,000 and 2,000 years ago, seen both in the number of sites and their overall incremental size/volume. Settlement expansion displays a circum-lagoon distribution of site clusters marked by some long-lived mounds and smaller sites. This coeval distribution has been interpreted as face-to-face communities around the lake sharing an essentially aquatic way of life, but also accessing nearby firm-ground hinterland resources. The lack of evidence for centralized power, together with evidence for cultural homogeneity and social integration, sedentariness, and economic intensification, strongly suggests the emergence of a heterarchical social structure. The distribution of mounds dedicated to ancestors points to the sharing of the territory between well-tied social units, possibly related to local lineages.
Archaeologists now perceive the sambaquis as long-lived monumental structures located in permanent places, highly visible in coastal cultural landscapes, and drenched with symbolic meaning (Fish et al. 2013). This interpretation clashes with previous views that saw them as giant middens or platforms for dry, elevated residences in the context of domestic activities (e.g., Beck 1972; Hurt 1974; Kneip 1977; Prous 1992; Rohr 1984). The enduring and socially orchestrated effort necessary to create these huge mounds of shell (up to 50 m in height and 600 m in diameter) is certainly not casual or unintentional. Instead, it has created impressive landmarks in which the ancestors are embedded in long-lived sacred landscapes (DeBlasis et al. 1998, 2007; Fish et al. 2013; Gaspar 1998, 2000; Gaspar et al. 2008).
Based on the seasonality of resources, the location of sites in the landscape, the thickness of archaeological layers, relative density of artifacts, and the composition of the faunal assemblages, Schmitz et al. (1998, 2009) have suggested that the Pantanal populations were highly mobile canoe foragers who left behind two different types of archaeological sites. On the one hand, central sites have larger, more permanently occupied habitation areas. They are located in central and more stable margins of the larger lagoons and river dykes and contain thicker stratigraphic layers, a higher density of archaeological artifacts, primary and secondary burials, and necklace beads; the faunal assemblage is mainly composed of fish, mammals, and birds. On the other hand, short-term, temporary sites were are located in seasonally flooded marshes and likely related to seasonal occupations. Shellfish and crustaceans dominate the faunal assemblages of these sites; they lack fish, reptile, mammal, and bird bones.
In some regions, such as in El Dorado, Pinhal da Serra, Anita Garibaldi, and Campos Novos, mound and enclosure complexes occur together in groups, usually on the top of prominent hills that today exhibit wide view-sheds; several are positioned in relation to localized natural features such as rock outcrops that mark the highest spot of these hills (Iriarte et al. 2013; Saldanha 2008). However, these funerary structures also can be found in lower positions in the landscape, such as in the Urubici region (Corteletti 2012; Corteletti et al. 2015, p. 47, fig. 1).
In conclusion, the southern Brazilian highlands represent one of the most promising research areas in the Río de La Plata basin to investigate scenarios of social change concomitant with major transformations in the landscape. It is increasingly clear that the marked expansion of the resource-rich Araucaria forest at the turn of the second millennium AD was accompanied by novel social developments among the Southern Proto-Jê groups. The most evident of these is the rise of a new funerary tradition, represented by the mound and enclosure complexes, where a few cremated burials were commemorated by events of feasting. Parallel to that, aggregated well-planned villages emerged, with evidence of a long duration of use and sometimes with notable disparities in pit house size. Some villages include centrally placed oversized pit houses, with diameters over 20 m, as well as mounded architecture. Management of the Araucaria forest, coupled with a more intense cultivation of domesticated plants, which also are present in the archaeobotanical record, might have provided the basis for the mortuary feasting events at mound and enclosure complexes, as well as leading to increased population density, territoriality, and disparities in house size. All of these processes potentially relate to the foundations of political complexity among the Southern Proto-Jê groups and to the formation of the regionally organized, hierarchical societies documented in the southern Brazilian highlands during the historical period.
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