The Amazonian statue. A biography of a famous and polemic artifact from Brazil. A estátua amazônica. Biografia de um famoso e polêmico artefato vindo do Brasil (original) (raw)
Books on the Brazilian archaeology published in English are not common and the exhibition Unknown Amazon in the British Museum offered thus an odd opportunity to produce a fine volume on native Amazonian material culture. The book is written by fifteen scholars, seven of them Brazilian, authors of twelve chapters plus a foreword (pp. 8-13), split between four parts on the economy and subsistence (part one, pp. 26-105), archaeology and society (part two, pp. 106-173), ideology-visual and material culture (part three, pp. 174-229), encounters (part four, pp. 230-286), each part with three chapters. In the introduction (pp. 14-19), Eduardo Neves and the other two editors state that as archaeologists, they believe that knowledge about the past has a vital role to play in opening up new perspectives on planning and decision-making for the future, so that the attention paid to the prehistoric past is directly linked to the present day and future interests of people, a main thrust of the whole volume. Presently John Hemming (p. 13) mentions 210 tribes and 350,000 indigenous people in Brazil, occupying 900,000 square kilometres,