Settlement III-BrzHis&Cul

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5.   Native Population
Focus: The entry (the principal identifiable one) of humankind into North America followed a route of Beringea (ancient land mass connecting Asia and North America where today there is the Bering Sea), the Rockies, and Andean coasts. Entry into central and eastern South America (later "Brazil") followed settlement patterns along the main river routes and their tributaries of the interior and then along the Atlantic coast. Homo sapiens sapiens (the most modern anatomical form of the human species homo sapiens, which appeared possibly as early as 150,000 years ago) definitively and massively began to settle in South America only about 15 thousand years ago.
        At some point millennia ago, the first human being touched the shore at the eastern-most point of Brazil, » Ponta do Seixas (today in the beach neighborhood of Cabo Branco in the city of João Pessôa, capital of Paraíba). This was a momentous event in human history. The species that had begun emigrating from eastern Africa almost a hundred thousands years ago had now circum-ambulated the entire terrestrial portion of the earth, settling throughout the planet's tropical belt and into its temperate zones. Ponta do Seixas was the "final stop" in the monumental odyssey of home sapiens sapiens over the earth. It was but only five centuries ago that the species finally devised a sea route to the same coastal area.
        This alien invading species from Africa via Asia was the largest and most lethal mammal in the South American ecology. Its cerebral skills for hunting allowed it to dominate any of its predators. Over the course of less than a hundred thousand years (out of the nearly four hundred million years during which there have been most modern living species) homo sapiens sapiens migrated over the entire earth. It settled in every type of ecological environment. A herbivore primate that had then evolved as also a carnivore, the species possessed an exceptional ability to feed on the widest variety (omnivore) of nutritional sources. Its increased ingestion of meat had created a protein surplus that concentrated in developing a dense cerebral capacity for analogical analysis of its environment. About 6,500 generations ago a "quantum leap" mutation occurred in homo sapiens that resulted in a denser capacity for analogical and memory operations.

        Thereby it could more effectively assert its relatively weak physical prowess against more anciently developed carnivores and could to an exceptional extent manipulate its habitat against hostile natural forces. Migrating into Europe, it extinguished a variety of homo sapiens, Neanderthal man, which had evolved in that region. Homo sapiens sapiens had developed exceptionally effective skills for aggression and social coordination in the intensely competitive carnivore hunter environment of eastern Africa. It was autochthonous to Africa east of the Rift Valley, locale of its ecological etiology. It survived and then thrived due to a capacity for lethality effective against all mammals, including its own species--unlike its closest DNA (99 percent) relatives, the bonobo (not carnivorous) and chimpanzee (somewhat carnivorous). Due to the recent development of the homo sapiens sapiens species, its DNA was fairly homogenous (there was no division into sub-species). Diseases affecting any one member could spread, therefore, to all, especially those with an immunological history isolated from the rest of the globally dispersed species.
        Disease antigens, however, were also related to another factor, the blood type of the indigenous American population. Having migrated into the Western Hemisphere tens of millennia ago, these people bore almost exclusively blood type O. In more recent millennia agriculture and cultivated grains came to dominance over hunting, emerging in the ancient Middle East. This change provided diets richer in carbohydrates, starches, and sugars. They also provoked a different variety of parasites from those of meat. To the immunity provided by blood type O against the traditional diet of humans, evolution developed types A, B, and AB with newer, broader antigen capacity. Europeans of the sixteenth century brought into the Americas blood types which protected them from parasites that had emerged in the agricultural developments of early civilizations. The ancient settlers of the Americas, where agriculture was a newer and more isolated development, bore only blood type O. Their bodies, therefore, had no immunological memory against the germs Europeans bore. Unable to withstand European diseases, the indigenous population of eastern South America was massively decimated in the early sixteenth century. The Portuguese intention of using this population as a labor supply was thwarted. Thereafter the Portuguese carried out a massive transfer of slave labor from Africa, radically and definitively altering the ethnic nature of the region.
        The pre-Euro-African human settlers in eastern South America divided for cultural and resource competition by language and geographic divisions : Tupi-Guarani (prime southern [Paraná/Paraguay] and northern [Amazon] river basins and the Atlantic coast); Gê (central highlands from coast); Arawak (north of Amazon river basin, nearer Atlantic coast); Carib (north of Amazon, from the interior toward the coast). The native population was a Stone Age culture of hunter/gatherers using slash and burn cultivation. The earliest human settlement discovered so far in Brazil is in the Amazon, at Pedra Pintada, from over 11,000 years ago. It seems to slightly precede the earliest settlement in North America, known as Clovis culture, and gives evidence of a species more directly related to African origins than the Mongolian origins of Clovis. Prehistoric rock paintings have also been discovered in the Serra da Capivara in Piauí. In attempting to estimate the size of the native population on the eve of Euro-African entry, several archeological/anthropological issues and techniques must be considered. These calculations are tentative and approximate for areas east of the Andes due to the paucity of material evidence and the relative paucity of undertakings to explore what may exist.

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The native population of eastern South America represented the frontier advance of the human species. At the time of European settlement in the Americas, therefore, societies of a dense and complex nature, known as civilizations, had developed in only two regions. The earliest occurred in the tropical areas of the Mexican coastal gulf (Olmec) and in southern Mexico and upper Central America (Maya). This development was followed by one in the cooler, temperate regions of the central sierra and valleys of Mexico (Tula-Aztec) and the central Andes from Colombia to Bolivia, with the principally dominant one being the Inca. The native population of Brazil on the eve of Portuguese settlement had advanced densely enough along the Atlantic coast to be engaged in constant as nutritionally abundant resources and survival increased competition for these.
However, warfare had not yet prompted its participants to identify stone minerals (iron, copper, bronze, etc.) that could be transformed by heat into tools and weapons. Such transformations intensify cultivation and competition, leading to social specialization and hierarchy, which supports additional production that fosters further population density. Rainforests are nutritionally rich, producing sufficient caloric intake for concentrated human settlement. Fish, small mammals, fowl, fruits, vegetables, and grains are abundant; but social structures and management of techniques are needed for sustained cultivation, especially of corn/maize or manioc/cassava, and husbandry. There has been much debate regarding what human population did or could exist in the Amazon region. Recent archeological discoveries on Marajó, an island in the mouth of the Amazon about the size of Switzerland, have provided evidence of the development of a native civilization on it that began around 3500 BC and peaked at 1000 AD. Such discovery has considerable implications regarding what could be further revealed through the vast region upriver.

          The Brazilian Indians that most Europeans first came into contact were various tribes of coastal Atlantic peoples (Tupinamba, Tupi, Tupiniquim, Tamoyo, etc.). They spoke what was part of the Guarani language group, a linguistic product of an extensive culture that settled many tropical and subtropical forest areas east of the Andes. To communicate with the native population, early colonial missionaries constructed an artificial language that consolidated the common elements of the many tribal variations of Guarani. This language was termed Tupi-Guarani or "lingua geral." Extensive Guarani trails between Paraguay and into southern and central Brazil provide evidence of pre-European trade, transportation, and communication.
         The network and region of interwoven trails was referred to as Peabiru (also Piabuyu) or Tape-Aviru. It extended into Bolivia and Peru, the Upper and Lower Peru of the Inca empire. It was said to have been designed by a figure of legend, Sumé, who had taught humans how to cultivate the land. This Inca trail network bore the Quechua name, "Peabiru," meaning "way to Peru." "Biru" signifies "mountain of the sun," the designation of the Incas for their land, Peru. Tape-Aviru was the Tupi-Guarani term for the Peru Way, "tape" meaning "way" and "aviru," "to Biru." Missionaries in the Americas alleged that the native population had once been evangelized by the Apostle St. Thomas, who supposedly proselytized in India, Asia, and then across the ocean to the Americas. As São Tomé in Portuguese, this apostle was equated with the Indian legendary figure, Sumé (or Quezalcoatl in Aztec and Maya cults).
Further Readings: "Indian Heritage of Brazil" by Charles Wagley in Brazil: Portrait of Half a Continent; chapter two on Asian biological and technological origins of native American population in » Indigenous Societies = Las sociedades originarias, UNESCO Online; ¦ » Online facsimile editions of: Voyage en Bresil by Jean de Lery and Hans Staden among the Tupinamba
Handouts: Tupi-Guarani word lists and Brazilian place names
Transparencies: Routes of pre-Columbian migration into Americas and within Brazil; table of comparative caloric intake of South American Indians; relation of intake to reproduction and competition
Realia: Guarani musical instruments
Videos: Scenes from the opening of The Mission ( » Synopsis of Film) and of The Tribe That Time Forgot, viewing native population from the first Portuguese contact to the current survival of members of Arara tribe in the Amazon
Internet:   » Asteroid Ending Dominance of Reptiles and Allowing Rise of Mammals on Earth Types of Primate and Early Hominids » Migrations of Homo Sapiens Sapiens » Peopling of South America 1 2 » Evolution of Blood Types and Immunological Capacity   » Pedra Pintada Images and Rock Paintings in the Serra da Capivara (click on web address of images for text and details)   » Map of Marajó Island and Marajoara Culture   » Ancient Xingu Settlements   » Tupinamba and Tupi-Guarani   » Pre-European Indigenous Settlements in Southern Brazil   » Peabiru and Incas » St. Thomas as Sumé (Quetzalcoatl in Middle America)   » Reality and myth of El Dorado   » Indigenous Population Estimates by State from sixteenth century to present » Contemporary Amazon Indian Life video clips » Map of Indian Tribes Today   » Dictionaries and Grammar of Guarani (Tupi-Guarani)   » Learn Tupi-Guarani    » Tupi Origin and Meaning of Names of Brazilian Cities

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» Legend of El Dorado ("The Golden One" ).
The gold of the Incas came from the northern part of South America, out of the Colombian Andes, and from the Guyana Highlands, above the Amazon valley. The Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch drives to penetrate and control the Amazon River were motivated by the desire to access the gold sources of the Incas. Finding gold was a driving passion of the Portuguese throughout their empire, motivating their exploits in Africa along the Ghana coast, up the Congo and the Zambezi Rivers, and through Asia in India and Indo-China. By the eighteenth century Brazil proved the culminating climax in this fixation.
The material has no inherent value, possessing only the allure of its sheen. Such appeal to primal human satisfaction and the scarcity of the mineral have delimited artistic and financial values throughout human history with massively brutal consequences.

6.    From the Roman Empire: Portugal
Focus: The formation of Portugal began with its foundation as Lusitania, a province in Hispania (peninsula of Iberia), a region that provided extensive agricultural and mineral resources for ancient Rome. Over the centuries Portugal progressively took advantage of its Atlantic frontier position to pursue global expansion.
        In 61 BC Julius Caesar began his career of military conquests by defeating the Lusitani (western Iberian Celts or Gauls), thereby bringing the far western Atlantic edge of Iberia under Roman control. The eastern portion of Hispania and northern shores of the Mediterranean had been incorporated as Roman colonies during the Punic Wars over the previous two centuries. From the Caesarean conquest there emerged several decades later the Roman province of Lusitania (27 BC), which would become a rich provider of raw materials for Rome. Out of Lusitania would, over a millennium later, develop the kingdom and country of Portugal. The founding organizational roots, therefore, of Portugal were Latin and Roman. Portugal would transmit these origins and characteristics throughout the Portuguese empire. From the Roman empire, through Lusitania and Portugal, Brazil received its: socio-political organization of patronus-clientus relationships; its latifundio (latus=wide, fundus=deep) land distribution; its patriarchal family (pater familias) organization; its pontifical-curial religion of Roman Catholicism (Caesar became pontifex maximus in 63 BC, a title still used by the Roman popes); and its Latin-based Portuguese language (almost all infinitives in Portuguese are the same as those in Latin but without a final "e"; and until the end of the twentieth century both languages were used in Brazil, the latter as one for Catholic ritual purposes, somewhat as Yoruba is a ritual language of Candomblé). Brazil acted on the edge of the emerging global market economy as an export plantation slavocracy that thought, organized, and communicated within a Roman mold. There are births that occur by Caesarian section--Caesar's own. Brazil may be said to have come into the world by Caesarian insertion. "Latin" America is essentially "Roman" America.
        With the decline of Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries BC, Germanic tribes (Suevi and Visigoths) occupied Iberia. Becoming Christianized, this population occupied the northwestern highlands and mountainous northern portion (Pyrenees) of the peninsula, to survive the Islamic invasions from North Africa in the eighth century. The feudal realm of Galicia (that earlier had also been a Gallic, or Celtic, retreat) in the northwest corner of the peninsula would nurture the seeds of both the Spanish and Portuguese languages. Al-Andalus (the emirate, later caliphate, of Cordoba) was the Islamic portion of Iberia, occupying (at its largest extent) an area below a southwest-to-northeast axis from the flood plains of the Tagus River that extended along the Cordillera Central and thence above Zaragoza into southern Catalonia. The portions of the future Portugal that were Islamic-occupied were the mouth of the Tagus, the lower regions of the river's flood plains, and the Algarve (Gharb Al-Andalus). Coimbra was the northwesternmost frontier outpost of Islamic influence, and between it and the Douro River lay a thinly populated area of porous Islamic suzerainty into which Christians sometimes raided. Against the region of Al-Andalus stretched an arc of various Christian realms that included Portucale (the nucleus of Portugal), Castile, Asturias, Aragon, and Catalonia (the nuclei of Spain).
        The Second Crusade in Iberia advanced southward under the Count of Portucale (from: portus galli = Port of the Gauls or Celts) out of the town of Oporto (Porto in Portuguese), at the mouth of the Douro River, in 1147. The conquest of Lisbon (Lisboa in Portuguese), at the mouth of the Tagus River, resulted in establishment, after papal recognition, of a kingdom of Portugal. The Count of Portucale, of the French house of Burgundy, established the first Portuguese royal dynasty. French knights and nobles led initiatives for the Crusades because they had confronted and organized against the advancing western frontier of Islam in Europe. The kingdom of Portugal and the medieval kingdom of Jerusalem (1099, under the house of Boulogne), which the crusaders founded after the First Crusade, were both products of Franco-European intervention in the Islamic world. (Even today in the Middle East any militant foreign intervention in the region may still be identified as "Frankish" or French.) During the early centuries of the kingdom of Portugal, the capital moved between Coimbra (central region) and Lisbon (in southern region). The thrust for the formation of the nation of Portugal was based on asserting its Latin, Roman, and Christian nature.   The conquest of the eastern Mediterranean by Islam and the decline of Italian dominance of Middle Eastern trade prompted Portugal to seek southern and eastern routes around the Mediterranean. It pursued this goal as it advanced its crusading campaign onto North Africa by conquering (1415) the Moorish city of Ceuta on the Mediterranean coast, east of Gibraltar.

Thereafter began the maritime discoveries and inventions that emanated from the navigational school of Prince Henry, a younger son of King João (John) I. The school was located in the town of Sagres, at the southern tip of Portugal, thrusting over the Atlantic and toward Africa. It developed a maritime technology during the fifteenth century that would allow Portugal to become, briefly, the first global-wide naval and trading power in history. Sagres developed Portuguese prowess by programming and integrating innovation in shipbuilding, map making, sea charting, instrument design, and seamanship. The caravel ship it designed integrated naval technology from both the Mediterranean (sails, hull) and northern Europe (rudder). (Previous to the Portuguese, the Europeans with the widest experience in ocean shipbuilding and sailing had been the Vikings.) Much of the support and organization for Prince Henry came from the Order of Chirst, of which he was head. The Order of Christ derived from the Knights of the Temple (Templars) of the First Crusade, who established in Portugal one of their first monastery fortresses at Tomar by the end of the twelfth century. When the Templars were suppressed for heresy in the fourteenth century, their organization and property were incorporated into the Order of Christ, under Portuguese royal protection. As a prince of the blood, Henry was their patron and they, his sponsor.
Internet: The premier literary account of the discoveries was the classic epic poem » Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads, that is, Deeds of the Portuguese People, echoing the epics of the Greek and Roman peoples in the Iliad and Aeniad) by Luis Vaz de Camões

7.    From the Portuguese Empire: Brazil
Focus: Progressive Portuguese voyages of discovery down the coast of West Africa over the course of the fifteenth century required extensive innovations in shipbuilding and rigging, nautical instruments, cartography, sailing expertise, and trading practices. The Portuguese empire was formed based on a network of global trading posts around the rim of the southern Atlantic, through the Indian Ocean, over the Straits of Malacca, and up into the China Sea and the Sea of Japan. The global Portuguese empire had India as its central focus, primarily the Malabar coast around Goa. The crucial sequence of voyages that ultimately resulted in the discovery of Brazil were: 1487-1488 (Bartolomeu Dias, reaching the southern tip of Africa); Christopher Columbus (1492, Genoa-born, Portuguese-trained navigator, finding a western route to the "Indies," however, for Spain, not Portugal); Vasco da Gama (1497-1498, traversing the Indian Ocean from Africa to India); and Pedro Álvares Cabral (1500, voyaging to India and in his advance through the South Atlantic following da Gama's precedent of navigating deeply westward). Portuguese navigation in the central southern Atlantic was in search of islands similar to the Azores, Canaries, Madeira, or Cabo Verde. Cabral's landing in 1500 on the eastern coast of South America was originally understood in the context of islands that had been discovered and settled in the Atlantic. In 1497 a Genoese compatriot of Columbus, Giovanni Cabotto (John Cabot), and later his son Sebastian, sailed under English royal sponsorship to find a north Atlantic route westward to Asia and "Hy-Brazil," an idyllic island of Celtic legend. Cabot's voyage resulted in the discovery of Newfoundland and the opening of vast cod fishing areas that became frequented by fishermen from Portugal and its Atlantic island possessions.
        Thus the first name for the newly encountered area of eastern South America was the "Ilha" de Vera Cruz. Later it became Santa Cruz; and finally, Brazil. Concerning the naming of "Brazil":
1) Gustavo Vargas Martínez, of the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico, traces the historical geographic identification of Brazil in:
" la representación cartográfica que ha tenido Brasil en mapas precolombinos, como podría ser en los árabes -- al-Juarismi (833), ibn-Hawqal (c. 960), al- Idrisi (1154), al-Qazwini (1258), al-Andaluzi (c.1260) -- como en mapas euroccidentales, a saber, los de Zuane Pizzigano (1425), Andrea Bianco (1436 y 1448), Grazioso Benincasa, Bartolomeo Pareto (1455), Henrico Martellus Germanus (1489), Martín Behaim (1492), por mencionar unos ejemplos....   Una madera de propiedades tintóreas, buscada afanosamente por los árabes desde hacía diez siglos en territorios ecuatoriales desde Sumatra hasta las Antillas, terminó su periplo oceánico dando nombre a una de las regiones más ricas del Nuevo Mundo.   Objeto de comercio entre los antiguos habitantes del desierto sahariano, se sabe que en el año 851 ya se facturaba y de esta manera llegó al sur ibérico. En latín bárbaro se conoció la kerba bersil, y en 1160 en la novela Perceval le Gallois, del ciclo de aventuras del Rey Arturo, se hablaba de “medias largas teñidas en bresil”.
One of the most thorough examinations of the phoneme "brz" as associated with the color red, tracing its origins to ancient Middle Eastern history, is recounted in "History of the Word Brazil" by Leo Wiener in The Histories of Brazil by Pero de Magalhães, translated by John B. Stetson, Jr. (New York: The Cortes Society, 1922), vol. 2, footnote 14, pp. 195-203. Further elaboration occurs (passim) in O Brasil na lenda e na cartografia antiga (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1941) by Gustavo Barroso.
2) Brazil was the name of an island of medieval Celtic legend, supposedly west of Ireland ( » see Map, "Brasil" is bisected island southwest of "Hibernia") and visited by St. Brendan in the early Middle Ages. That island, "Hy Brazil," was recounted in the novel Summer of the Red Wolf by Morris L. West to be a "blessed storm less isle, where all men are good and all the women pure and where God retreats for a recreation from the rest of us." The Encyclopedia Britannica (11th edition, 1911) comments:
"BRAZIL, or BRASIL, a legendary island in the Atlantic Ocean. The name connects itself with the red dye-woods so called in the middle ages, possibly also applied to other vegetable dyes, and so descending from the Insulae Purpurariae of Pliny. It first appears as the I. de Brazi in the Venetian map of Andrea Bianco (1436), where it is found attached to one of the larger islands of the Azores. When this group became better known and was colonized, the island in question was renamed Terceira. It is probable that the familiar existence of Brazil as a geographical name led to its bestowal upon the vast region of South America, which was found to supply dye-woods kindred to those which the name properly denoted. The older memory survived also, and the Island of Brazil retained its place in mid-ocean, some hundred miles to the west of Ireland, both in the traditions of the forecastle and in charts. In J. Purdys General Chart of the Atlantic, corrected to 1830, the Brazil Rock (high) is marked with no indication of doubt, in 51 10 N. and 15 50 W. In a chart of currents by A. G. Findlay, dated 1853, these names appear again. But in his 12th edition. of Purdy's Memoir Descriptive and Explanatory of the N. Atlantic Ocean (1865), the existence of Brazil and some other legendary islands is briefly discussed and rejected. "   For images and details, see   » Bianco Map
3) The word "brazil" is associated with a type of dyewood tree (Caesalpinia sappan) that grew in the Indian regions of the Portuguese empire. Providing a reddish orange or purplish dye, the tree was described as "ember wood." The Portuguese phrase for this designation was "pau brasil," from the word "pau" for "wood." The word "brasil" could refer to something that is "ember-like or reddish-like." "Brasa" is the Portuguese word for "ember." The adjective derived from this noun is "brasil." The dye was valuable because of the distinctive or distinguished association it provided. Along the tropical Atlantic coast of South America, the Portuguese discovered plentiful stands of pau brasil.   This New World variety was Caesalpinia echinata.   (It should be recalled that at one time the regions that would become India and Brazil were parts of the same continent, Gondwana, the former lying on its eastern tip and the latter in its central western part.) As the only product of value from this territory, such a characteristic defined the region as a place for finding the commodity of "brasil." In naming newly discovered territories the Portuguese generally used nomenclature not only from saints and religious events but also natural phenomenon. From the latter category, therefore, they named: Cabo Verde (green cape), Camarões (shrimp, today known as the country of Cameroon), Costa de Marfim (ivory coast, today Côte d'Ivoire), Costa de Ouro (gold coast, today Ghana), etc.
        Naming the eastern portion of South America as "brazil" resulted from the convergence of two different medieval and early Renaissance uses of this word. Locales that provided red dye were marked on maps as "a brazil place." (Recall that there is a city in northern California named "Redwoods.") Moreover, maps also marked a legendary island either west of Ireland or alternately in the upper or middle Atlantic, as the "brazil isle locale." After the discoveries of Columbus over the western Atlantic, John Cabot, sailing for the English monarch, Henry VII, searched for Hy-Brazil but discovered Newfoundland (1497). Frequented by Portuguese cod fishermen, it was briefly considered territory of the king of Portugal at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The neighboring region of "Labrador" derives from Portuguese. Brazil obtained its name due primarily to its having an abundance of a widely sought red dye, having a Portuguese nomenclature, and possibly also to its being located along a part of an ocean and at a time when explorers were seeking idyllic locales, one of which was a "Brazil isle" of Celtic legend. In the first sense Brazil was a product label; in the second, a compound toponym.
        Further factors determining the name of Brazil were the positions of French and Italian navigators and statesmen. The French especially sought claims along the coast of South America. They refused to recognize that the New World had been divided under papal authorization between Spain and Portugal. The official Portuguese name for its territory in eastern South America was the "Província de Santa Cruz." Other nationalities refused to use this name and referred to the area as either the "land of brazil" or the "land of parrots."
        The initial position of Brazil in relation to the rest of the Portuguese empire was very inferior, red dye being of only limited value relative to spices and luxury goods from India and the Far East. To encourage settlement in Brazil, land was given out in vast allotments under hereditary captaincies. The captaincies measured 50 leagues in length along the coast, the width extending to the boundary of the Treaty of Tordesillas. (A league measures almost 2,000 hectares or over 4,400 acres.) Ultimately sugar came to be the most valuable product from the colony of Brazil. Its cultivation and marketing emerged historically from Mediterranean and Atlantic islands. Competition for the Portuguese empire and Brazil appeared from the Spanish, Dutch, French, and English. The economic and administrative circuit of colonial Brazil extended around a southern Atlantic basin, comprising the eastern coast of South America, the western coast of Africa, and the southern edge of Portugal.

The Portuguese commemoration of the Crowning of the Holy Spirit becomes the Brazilian feast of the Divine Holy Spirit.

Further Readings: | » História das ilhas atlânticas, Centro de Estudos da História do Atlântico (online), 1994
Transparencies: Portuguese architecture (Manueline) resulting from wealth of the discoveries
Realia: Models of a caravel ship, pocket sun time piece, astrolabe
Video: Sections from quincentennial film series on the making of the ships of Columbus; techniques based on Portuguese caravel construction
Terms: 1) latifundia system - distribution of extensive areas of land with only parts of it usually under cultivation by owners; 2) fazenda (hacienda in Spanish) = plantation, farm, or ranch that was usually quite large due to concentrating on cultivation of one product for export; term comes from Portuguese word "fazer" meaning "to do" and indicating that something was being "done with" or "made from" land; 3) sesmaria* - used primarily in colonial times to describe measuring large plots of land for property rights and the extensive landholdings resulting from such measurement; term is somewhat similar in English to "measuring in lots" and "having a lot"; 4) zona da mata - rich coastal land, principally in Northeast, used chiefly for sugar cultivation; 5) sertão - dry uplands (caatinga vegetation) beyond coastal sierra of Northeast, used primarily for the grazing of roaming cattle; 6) agreste - hilly transition zone in piedmont of coastal sierra rising from the zona da mata to the sertão, used for subsistence and urban market agriculture
* The official dimensions of a sesmaria varied and tended to diminish as a colonial territory became more populated. In the late seventeenth century a sesmaria in the São Paulo captaincy varied from three to four square leagues, approximately 15 to 20 square kilometers or 5.8 to 7.7 square miles (almost 3,700 to 4,900 acres).
Internet: » Making of the Portuguese Empire in Africa, Asia, and Americas with Inventory of Structures of the Portuguese Empire » Views and Maps of Goa » Animation of Voyages » Instructions to Pedro Álvares Cabral from Vasco da Gama regarding voyage of 1500 » Full-text Retrieval of Historic Works on Discovery of Brazil » First Sighting of the "Ilha de Vera Cruz" » One of Oldest Surviving Maps of Brazil (from Ottoman Admiral Piri Reis, 1513) » Legends about the Imaginary Island of "Hi(y)-Brazil" or "O-Brazil" » John and Sebastian Cabot » Treaty of Tordesillas, 1494 » Captaincies of Brazil » Colonial Map of Captaincies and Maps with Lists of Captaincies and Donatory-Captains 1 2 » King Manuel I, the first monarch of Brazil, and Manueline Architectural Style

8. African
Focus: In emigrating out of eastern African, homo sapiens sapiens settled eastward, migrating into Asia, and westward, crossing either into northern sub-Sahara Africa or, latterly, into Europe from Asia. Over the course of the first millennium AD, settlement along the western coast of Africa was a multitudinous mixture, among which were Bantu, Yoruba, animist, and Islamic cultures, religions, and languages. These cultures had Iron Age labor and social organization, warfare, and trade. The geology and ecology of western Africa had ancient geographical affinities with eastern South America. Cultures of the Niger and Congo River basins would be transferred there. The size of the total African population transferred to the Americas from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries can only be estimated. It was at a minimum approximately ten million and at a maximum fifteen million, with possibly 20 percent dying en route. A third of this, the largest portion, was sent to Brazil.

        The character of the African population in Brazil varied, from Islamic Sudanese of north central Africa to Yoruba speakers from central coastal Africa (Bight of Benin) and to Bantu speakers from southern regions. The Yoruba, although very influential, comprised but one of many groups that originated from a wider slave-producing region along the coast of northwestern bulge of Africa. The crescent of this region was divided into Upper Guinea (also referred to as Guiné), stretching along the coast from the Canary Islands to Cabo Verde; and Lower Guinea (also Mina), lying along the coastal stretch from Côte d'Ivoire to Nigeria. Although Africans of different origin were scattered throughout Brazil, there was a tendency for those from the upper portion of Africa (Guinean) to be settled in northern Brazil, especially Bahia; and from the lower portion (Angolan), in southern Brazil, especially Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. The origins in Africa of slaves changed over the course of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. During the early years of the Brazilian slave trade, tens of thousands of Africans were shipped from the Upper Guinea region. But over the course of the sixteenth century, the origins shifted southward, with hundreds of thousands coming from Angola and adjacent regions. By the following century, in even greater numbers, slaves continued from the southern African area but supplemented by massive transfers from Lower Guinea. It has been said that sugar was Brazil, and Brazil was Angola.
        At the end of the fifteenth and through the following century, Portugal was the first European power to establish relations with one of the most advanced states in sub-Sahara Africa, the kingdom of the Kongo. This kingdom, founded in the fourteenth century, had expanded across the mouth of the Congo (or Zaïre) River from (what are today) southern Gabon to northwestern Angola, and extended inland (at the height of its power) to the modern cities of Brazzaville and Kinshasa, below the Malebo Pool in the Congo River. Its "leopard" monarchs converted to Christianity, becoming client kings of the Portuguese monarchy for trade in slaves from Bantu tribal regions out of the plateau regions of Angola and the uplands of the Zambesi River. The Portuguese entrepôt for this trade was the island of São Tomé. Trade for slaves from southeastern Africa was controlled by the Portuguese from Mozambique, the southern base of their trade along the Swahili coast and into the Indian Ocean.
        The incorporation on a mass scale of African and Indian populations with (and under) the Portuguese for over centuries formed the basis of Brazil as a "Mediterranean world in the southern Atlantic." The Portuguese colonized the rim areas of the southern Atlantic basin, subduing by disease and warfare the native population of eastern South America and massively transferring into that region populations from western Africa. African influence permeated Brazilian culture as evidenced in religion, foods, cooking, language, music, family relations, health remedies, etc. It especially influenced the social structure of hierarchy through interactions of master and slave. However, most lastingly, it wove an elaborate web of parallel family structuring, emotional interdependence, and diplomatic deference and congeniality, fundamental to social functioning.
        The influence of African culture on Brazilian national character cannot be underestimated. How many visitors to the country are struck, for example, by the close cordiality and warm intensity of its people? The mass of African slaves found security only in direct personal connections of support. They elaborated a familial environment of real and fictive kin. They reinforced this with a spiritual landscape rooted not in a distant supernatural but in a natural environment of animated interactive spirits. The reality of work was one of rewardless labor. Its profit was not income but surcease from it; the only benefits were leisure and pleasure.
        Propertyless, they negotiated society not through what they owned but through how they deferred to, cajoled, or allied with those who owned them. Mixed race and lower class whites, in the interstices of the tight, restricted Brazilian hierarchy, had similar social pressures and mental constructs. The marginalized and the enslaved synthesized a common world view. The highest value was given to demonstrating "jeito," possessing ingenuity in getting around and through the tropical labyrinth of Brazil by pulling on the threads of one's elaborate social relations, invoking both the real and imagined. The only values that ultimately mattered were commodity and emotional ones. Survival meant entrepreneurship and empathy. Ethical or moral values often had manipulative, subordinating purposes. They were transparently hypocritical to those ordered to wait in attendance along walls or behind curtains, bearing silent witness to duplicity as they were "seen but not heard." One's defenses became both a punctuating abundance of ironic humor and subterfuges and escapes wrought through ingenious jeito. Competitive individualism could dangerously isolate one. Only cooperation and solidarity resonated.

Further Readings: "Historical Setting," first two sections in chapter one of » Angola: A Country Study, Online: Library of Congress Research Division, 1989; ¦ » Nigeria: A Country Study, Online: Library of Congress Research Division, 1991
Research Reference Resources: » Dossier of Africa-Atlantic-Americas Maps (click thumbnail to enlarge a map); » Estimated Slave Arrivals in Brazil, 1781-1855; by Region, 1864-1887; Brazilian Population by Color (Self-Described), 1872-1991; ¦ » International Index to Black Periodicals indexes and provides full-text retrieval of international research in African studies; ¦ » Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, compendium of data on 27,227 transatlantic slave trading voyages that occurred between 1650 and 1867. The largest uniform, consolidated database of its kind, it covers approximately two-thirds of the voyages. It details not only basic demographic characteristics of mortality, age, and gender of slaves but also provides data on crew membership, physical conditions and age of vessels, duration of voyages, slave resistance, and the business organization of slave traders. Data on slaves liberated from slaver ships during the first half of the nineteenth century was gathered by contemporary commissions in Sierra Leone, Cape Town, Liberia, Rio de Janeiro, Havana, and St. Helena, recording the name, age, gender, height, place of habitation, and tribal scars of each captured individual.

Reproductions: Works of Yoruba sculpture and crafts from art books
Transparencies: Routes of African settlement in Brazil
Languages and Regions: » Upper and Lower Guinea and Maps 1   2   » Yoruba and the Bantu languages belong to the Niger-Congo linguistic group, but Yoruba remained concentrated in Nigeria while Bantu languages spread throughout the lower half of Africa in consequence of Bantu iron technology advances and subsequent progressive conquests » African and Bantu Languages   » Yoruba   » Photo Gallery of Yoruba Sculpture    » Expansion of Bantu (at base of page, link to BBC radio program on Bantu migrations) from western to southern and eastern Africa   » Maps of Bantu Languages   » Iron Use in Africa and by Bantus » Kingdom of the Kongo 1   2   3 with Map and King Afonso I
Religion and Culture: » Candomblé with Yoruba Cosmos and Images of Orixás   » Comparison of Orixás and Catholic Saints and an Altar in a Terreiro   » Varied African Cultural Practices besides Religion Transferred to Brazil 1   2 including Healing Practices and Foods and Cooking » Photography of Pierre Verger Comparing Bahia and Nigeria
» Terms: Candomblé comprises a synthesis (syncretism), emerging in colonial Brazil, of Yoruba-derived religious divinities and rituals with Catholic rites and figures of adoration. Umbanda refers to a synthesis, developing primarily in southern Brazil in the late nineteenth century, of Candomblé with a mixture of perceptions about Brazilian indigenous religious practices and of European/Oriental spiritism. Macumba can be used to describe either Candomblé, Umbanda, or any Afro-Brazilian religion. It may also be used to describe a type of black magic or manipulation of spiritual forces for malevolent purposes. Quimbanda is a term also used to refer to Macumba.
It may be noted that references to the "syncretic" nature of Afro-Brazilian religions, their synthesis of African animism and Roman Catholicism, often denote the historical transparency of their fabricated nature. In this regard, therefore, the remote origins of Christianity has dimmed the nature of its synthesis. Based on a nucleus of rabbinical Judaism, it incorporated a range of additional eastern Mediterranean religious and philosophical movements of two millennia ago, such as Mithraism, neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, Isis worship, etc. It achieved socio-political importance as its institutions rose replacing the decaying structures of the Roman empire. So also the synthesis of Judaism, extending back three millennia, incorporated among a Cis-Jordanian hill folk the rituals and worldviews of surrounding Semitic peoples in the Middle East.
Music: Much of Brazilian popular music, especially samba, is based on African "call and response" singing and on syncopation, the accenting of sounds between beats; listen to examples from   » Afro-American Music   » African Use of drums, rattles, and bells at core of Brazilian popular music   » Sounds of African Percussion Instruments
Dance/Martial Art: » Gallery of Capoeira Scenes  with Capoeira Film Clips 1   2   » Animated Capoeira Movements » Berimbau Instrument and Steps and Positions in Capoeira   » Capoeira Resources 1   2
Videos: 1) Scenes of shipping of African slaves in film, Amistad 2) Scenes of Candomblé seance in film, Black Orpheus » Synopsis of Film

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