From Historical Maps to Social Cartography in the Lower Amazon, Pará State, Brazil: Historical and Contemporary Archaeology approaches to the Rubber Boom

Tiago Silva Alves Muniz

This article presents a mapping of the Brazilian Amazon drawn from historical and GIS maps of the area. It foregrounds the use of historical maps as a resource for discovering the history of the colonisation of the Amazon and the value of contemporary archaeology in revealing the lives of the original and traditional peoples who lived and still live there. The ongoing research aims to explore the role of mapping in engaging Lower Amazon communities with their heritage. The colonial occupation of the Amazon began with expanding the Portuguese frontier to the west and to achieve backcountry drugs. Afterwards, the recolonising of the Amazon and its indigenous peoples created belle époque rubber elites and left traditional communities and their native rubber tree plantations behind. Today, most of the rubber tappers’ communities in the Lower Amazon thrive mainly on traditional practices, such as hunting, fishing, producing manioc flour and selling forest products. The aim of the project is to recognise local knowledge and inform a critical heritage studies debate about the rubber tappers’ heritage futures.

Focusing on the Lower Amazon, a mesoregion of Pará State, this article presents an account of the colonial occupation of the Lower Amazon during the expansion of the Portuguese frontier to the west and recolonization during the rubber boom as reflected in historical maps of the Tapajós River. It brings historical mapping narratives together with newly emerging evidence of indigenous peoples and rubber trappers’ presence from archaeological investigations at Boim, located in the Extractive Reserve of Tapajós and Arapiuns, a village that was part of the history of the rubber trade. It foregrounds the analysis of historical maps as a resource for discovering the history of the colonisation of the Amazon and the value of contemporary archaeological research in revealing the lives and stories of the indigenous peoples and rubber trappers who lived and still live there as a counter-narrative to the colonialist portrayals of the region as an uninhabited wilderness ripe for the exploitation of its natural resources.

Mapping the Tapajós River: A Brief History

The presence of Europeans in the Lower Amazon began in 1542, when Jesuits entered the river known by the indigenous people as the Paraná-Pixuna, now known as the Tapajós River. Francisco Orellana and Friar Gaspar de Carvajal sailed up the river with fifty men to fulfil their mission of raising indigenous labour, and to catechize and colonise the region.

The Tapajós River first appeared on a map of the Amazon river system made by a Dutch cartographer, Diego Gutiérez in 1562, later in 1585 Johannes Van Doetechum references the river ‘Tapajos’ and it later appears as the Tapajós River on a series of maps created by the Englishman, Sir Walter Raleighin in 1592, the German, Theodore de Bry in 1592, the Belgian Cornelis de Jode in 1593 and the Dutchman Jan Huygen van Linschoten in 1596. These 16th century (for coherence with notation later in the text) maps were not very accurate as at that time just a small part of the Tapajós River was known to non-indigenous people. 

At this time, all maps included representations of mythical creatures such as snakes, dragons and imagined creatures depicted both inland and/or over the seas (Figure 1). These illustrations were used by cartographers to denote dangerous or unexplored territories, images that reinforced a sense of danger and ’otherness’ to the maps that contributed to colonialist narratives of wilderness and the ‘taming’ of indigenous people and occupation and ’civilising’ of their lands.[1]

In 1626, Manuel de Sousa, chief of the Grão-Pará State, organised expeditions to capture indigenous people for labour in northern Brazil and in the same year, the Portuguese explorer Pedro Teixeira arrived in Paraná-Pixuna and discovered the river mouth, naming it the Tapajós River to signifying the location of the Portuguese court. 

Later, in 1706, another expedition under the command of Captain Francisco Soeiro de Vilhena set out to discover the source of the Black Water River and to ‘rescue’ the indigenous people who lived upstream.[3]

However, the first non-indigenous person to travel the length of the Tapajós was the Brazilian João de Souza de Azevedo in 1748.[4] João de Souza de Azevedo was a merchant from Central Brazil (Cuiabá, Mato Grosso) who travelled north through the Arinos and Tapajós Rivers to the Amazon River from there he went east to Belém city. 

By the 19th century, the expedition of the Prussian Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff (1824-1829) passing through Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and São Paulo would follow the same way from Mato Grosso to the Amazon river. Langsdorff created several maps of Brazil documenting its geography and biomass.[5] The Swiss artist Hércules Florence was also with Langsdorff’s crew and did detailed paintings and sketches of Colonial Brazil.[6] Chandless also described the Arinos, Juruena and Tapajós Rivers.[7] Expeditions of naturalists and travellers to the Amazon became increasingly common, especially during the second half of the 19th century. Most notably those undertaken by Johann Baptist von Spix, Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Spruce. 

In his ethnolinguistic map of Brazil, Von Martius demonstrated Brazil’s cultural diversity, flows and territories.[8] By that time, in the region on the Tapajós River, the indigenous people of the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family had been located (Figure 2). 

Among colonial interests to map and expand western Brazilian territory by the 19th century, it was the Frenchman Henri Coudreau who made the first detailed map of the Tapajós River.[10] Coudreau’s map showed geological information, areas with ancient uses, its archaeological material culture and also plots of the occupation and areas where rubber tappers lived. (Figure 3).

Mapping Rubber Exploitation: Loneliness in The Jungle?

The presence of rubber tappers was registered along the Tapajós River by Coudreau. As the rubber economy increased in the area, merchants and workers established all along the Tapajós River. In 1879, due to a dry season in the Brazilian northeast, many people migrated to the Amazon in order to work as rubber tappers. Also, some Jewish merchants that came from Morocco played an important role in the Amazonian rubber commerce system known as “aviamento”.[11] These mapping narratives demonstrate that the analysis of historical maps can be an important research tool for exploring the history of colonisation and the cultural relationships between colonists and indigenous people during the two rubber economy cycles of 1850-1920 and 1943-1945. 

Rubber historiography has portrayed the rubber tappers as solitary men within the “loneliness in the jungle” and the Amazon Rain Forest as a green desert. A discourse that allowed the idea of indigenous lands as empty spaces to be fulfilled by waves of western development and colonisation (see for example, Roosevelt, 1914)[12] and later by Getúlio Vargas, the President and dictator of Brazil from 1930 – 1945,[13] and the Brazilian Military Regime from 1964 to 1985, in its desire to occupy the Amazonian territory and “re-colonize” it.[14]

Moving forward to today, at Santarém, the biggest city in the Lower Amazon, there are two main areas occupied by rubber tappers and remnants: FLONA Tapajós and RESEX Tapajós-Arapiuns. The FLONA Tapajós is a National Forest conservation area created in 1974 and the RESEX Tapajós-Arapiuns is an extractive reserve created in 1998. Social mapping at the Lower Tapajós River started only around the 2000s, where indigenous and traditional peoples as well as rubber tappers live. 

The occurrence of archaeological material was detected during previous fieldwork at Boim Village, and through these archaeological data, information of the long-term history to the contemporary past can be added about these peoples (Figure 4).

It is only during the last two decades that the role of women during the rubber boom has been discussed.[15] Many indigenous peoples also worked as rubber tappers and were exploited in many ways, in a recolonization process in the Amazon lacking law and ethics towards the protection of indigenous peoples.[16] As historical maps show and archaeological materials corroborates, there was a substantial population of indigenous peoples occupying the Amazon. Contrary to colonial narratives, it was not a demographic void neither a green desert, rather it became a territory in dispute and its people’s histories were silently forgotten and displaced by the of wilderness and/or loneliness narratives.

Despite the wealth that was created by the rubber economy, most of the rubber tappers’ communities in the Lower Amazon today still have no electric power and thrive mainly on small scale traditional practices of hunting, fishing, producing manioc flour and selling forest products.

The Historical and Contemporary Archaeology of Rubber and Modernity

The ongoing archaeological project begins at Boim Village,[17] where a rubber tapper found some stoneware and glass bottles around ancient native rubber trees, Hevea brasiliensis (Figure 5). This is believed to be the same site where Sir Henry Alexander Wickham collected rubber seeds to be sold to Kews Garden in 1876. This fact would change world economy in following decades. Rubber products such as gloves, tyres and industrial items by the turn of 20th century would shape the world to what one might call ‘modern’.[18] Nevertheless, the place where the native rubber tree seeds were collected was forgotten.  

Archaeological materials found in Boim were plotted in six locations:

·       Seringal Veneza: native rubber trees area where stoneware’s and glass bottles of champagne and beer were found.

·       Cemitério Judeu: a Jewish cemetery of the first rubber merchants in the area.

·       Serraria: an area where indigenous ceramics are found in a layer of anthropogenic dark earth soil.

·       Vila de Boim: the historic centre of the Village where many shreds of historical wares can be found widely scattered.

·       Ponta do pau-da-letra: an ancient place, the original location of the harbour of Boim.

·       Seringal Colônia: an area where cultivated rubber trees were tapped and indigenous ceramics can also be found.

Final considerations and expected results

The aim of this research is to debate the theoretical historical and contemporary archaeology of the area drawing on historical mapping, and artefacts to engage the community with its rubber economy heritage. Social mapping will continue to register the activities that take place at those historical places. Also, oral history will record the memories of the rubber boom to add to the debate about the uses of the territory and its transformations. The project aims to challenge the view of the Amazon as a demographic void through the analysis of its indigenous and colonial history. Engaging the community in public archaeology activities and critical heritage studies will contribute to understanding the rubber tappers’ future in the Amazon. 

Author 

Tiago Silva Alves Muniz is an archaeologist, PhD candidate in Anthropology (Archaeology) at Federal University of Pará (Brazil) and recently concluded 1-year period as Visiting researcher at Dept. of Cultural Sciences at Linnaeus University (Sweden). Muniz’s expertise is in historical and contemporary archaeology; Amazonian archaeology; critical heritage studies and ethnobotany.

Notes

[1] Brownstein, D. Sea Monsters on Medieval and Renaissance Maps. Chet Van Duzer. London: British Library, 2013. 144 pp. $35. Renaissance Quarterly, 68(3), 1028-1030. DOI: 10.1086/683897. 2015.

[2] Gutiérez, Diego. Americae sive qvartae orbis partis nova et exactissima descriptio / avctore Diego Gvtiero Philippi Regis Hisp. etc. Cosmographo; Hiero. Cock excvde. 1562; Hieronymus Cock excude cum gratia et priuilegio 1562. Availabe at https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3290.ct000342, 18/12/2019. 

[3] Canto, Sidney Augusto. Santarém outras histórias. Santarém; Gráfica e Editora Tiagão, 2013.

[4] Hemming, John. Indians and the Frontier. Colonial Brazil, p. 145-89, 1987.

[5] Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil. Expedição Langsdorff. São Paulo/Brasília/Rio de Janeiro, CCBB, 2010. Available at: https://www.bb.com.br/docs/pub/inst/dwn/Langsdorff.pdf, 18/12/2019.

[6] Florence, Hercules. Viagem fluvial do Tietê ao Amazonas de 1825 a 1829. Translated by Visconde de Taunay. Brasília: Senado Federal, Conselho Editorial, 2007. Available at http://www2.senado.leg.br/bdsf/handle/id/188906, 18/12/2019.

[7] Chandless, William. Notes on the rivers Arinos, Juruena, and Tapajós. The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, v. 32, p. 268-280, 1862.

[8] Martius, Karl von. 1867. Beiträge zur Ethnographie und Sprachenkunde Amerikas zumal Brasiliens. Die ehemalige Verbreitung und die muthmasslichen Wanderungen der Tupis. Biblioteca Digital Curt Nimuendaju. Available at http://www.etnolinguistica.org/index:biblio, 16/11/ 2018.

[9] Martius, Karl von. 1867

[10] Coudreau, Henri Anatole. Voyage au Tapajos. 1897.

[11] Weinstein, Barbara. The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920. Stanford University Press, 1983; Blay, Eva Alterman. Judeus na Amazônia. Identidades judaicas no Brasil contemporâneo, p. 25-57, 2008.

[12] Roosevelt, Theodore. Through the Brazilian Wilderness. New York: Scribner, 1914. Print.

[13] Brito, Agda Lima. " Eu trabalhei também": as trabalhadoras nos seringais do Amazonas (1940-1950). História & Parcerias. Anais do Encontro Internacional e XVIII Encontro de História da Anpuh-Rio. Rio de Janeiro. 2018.

[14] Cesco, Susana; LIMA, Eli de Fátima Napoleão de. “Terra da Promissão”: recolonização e natureza na história amazônica. Territórios e Fronteiras, v. 11, n. 2, p. 123-151, 2018.

[15] Wolff, C.S. Mulheres da Floresta: uma História do Alto Juruá, Acre (1890-1945). São Paulo: HUCITEC. 1999; Lage, Mônica Maria Lopes. Mulher e seringal: um olhar sobre as mulheres nos seringais do Amazonas (1880-1920). Dissertação de Mestrado em História. UFAM. 2010; Alves, Eva da Silva; Pinto, Auxiliadora dos Santos; Caetanoc, Renato Fernandes. Memórias de Mulheres Seringueiras na Reserva Extrativista Rio Ouro Preto/RO: Linguagem, Cultura e Identidade. Amazônica-Revista de Antropologia, v. 10, n. 2, p. 738-761, 2018; Brito, Agda Lima, 2018.

[16] Cemin, Arneide Bandeira. Denúncias de estupro contra a mulher indígena: Bioética intercultural feminista, saúde coletiva e justiça. Amazônica-Revista de Antropologia, v. 8, n. 2, p. 342-370, 2017.

[17] Muniz, T. S. A., Towards an archaeology of rubber. Brasiliana: Journal for Brazilian Studies, 9(2), pp.233-251.

[18] Latour, B. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard university press. 1987.