Did Brazil Have an Urban Civilization Prior to European Colonization?

For the first time ever, the answer would seem to be, "most likely, yes." In an article published in Science this week, a team of archeologists makes the first strong argument for the existence of an indigenous Amazonian urban network prior to European arrival in Brazil.

This really is big news to scholars' understanding of the pre-European history of Brazil, about which we know virtually nothing. While we have learned much about the Nahuas (of which the Aztecs were but one part) and Mayas of Mexico and the Incas of Peru through their large, concentrated civilizations and their writing systems, we know very little of Brazilian indigenous peoples prior to 1500 beyond the fact that they had four basic language groups, they operated in small nomadic groups that would occasionally battle other groups, and we have a slight familiarity with their religious beliefs and worldviews, passed down from when the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil in 1500. However, even our knowledge of these groups is based mostly on coastal indigenous groups, and not those from the Amazonian basin. While scholars have imagined for awhile that there might have been larger, more concentrated indigenous groups within the Amazon, there was little evidence forthcoming on this beyond some archeological finds of ceramics that raised twice as many questions as they answered. So the fact that there is now evidence of an organized urban civilization in the Amazon prior to European arrival is indeed huge news for Brazilian and Latin American history, archeology, and anthropology.

Still, as amazing and fascinating as this new evidence is, and for as many questions as it raises about pre-European history in Brazil, it isn't so revolutionary as to change the general history (vs. archeology) of Brazil compared to the rest of Americas. Scholars often say that one of the reasons (and I strongly stress that it is only one of several) that Portuguese colonization of Brazil was so different from the Spanish colonization of the Americas was the fact that the Spaniards ran into civilizations like the Inca, Nahua, and Maya, the likes of which the Portuguese never had to contend with.This remains the case; for decades and decades, the Portuguese did not bother to really colonize deep into Brazil, preferring to remain on the coast and only going in as the resources demanded (as in the case of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais, where gold and diamonds were found). While the Spanish Crown set up its basic governmental institutions, such as the viceroyalty and churches, to subject and convert the large concentrations of indigenous peoples to its rule, the Portuguese continued throughout their colonial period to have limited contact with indigenous peoples, both as the latter were affected by disease and as they retreated further inland while the Portuguese established themselves on the coast. In one of the better ironies of Brazil's history, the Portuguese crown was far more hands-off with its Brazilian territory than the Spanish crown was with its colonies, up to the moment in 1808 when the Portuguese crown became the first European royal family to ever visit one of its own colonies when Dom Joao was displaced by the Napoleonic Wars. Thus, the concentrated efforts to force conversion and submission of the indigenous in Brazil was never as strong as it was in Spanish America because the Portuguese simply never had to deal with those large urban civilizaitons directly. (And that's not to say that the Portuguese weren't brutal in their treatment of indigenous peoples like the Spanish; they, too, were an awful group. They just had fewer indigenous people in toto than the Spanish did.)

So is this find going to completely transform and destroy our previous understanding of Brazilian history from 1500 onward? Most likely not. Still, the fact that we are for the first time getting evidence of any type of urban civilizations in the Amazon is major and exciting news (and I am a dork, so it's really exciting).