Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A Glance Backward
For scholars of Amazonian pre-Columbian history, the Contestado territory—today
known as the Brazilian state of Amapá—is of considerable interest. It is a place of an-
tiquity of human occupation in the New World, part of the sophisticated estuary and
north coastal cultures of Amazonia, and includes sites of raised fields, ceramic master-
pieces, exquisite funerary art, and other evidence of highly developed civilizations. It
has an extraordinary pre-Columbian astronomical observatory, a two-thousand-year-old
“tropical Stonehenge” of some 127 upright stones arrayed in circular and other orienta-
tions, for marking solstices and equinoxes.
2
The Guianas were connected to the Caribbean by pre-Columbian diasporas and trade
routes,andtotheAmazoninteriorbycommercial,military,andmigrationroutesthrough
the Orinoco, the Rio Negro, the Essequibo, and down the Parú, Jarí, and Trombetas to
the Amazon River itself. Trading states like the Carib and some Arawak polities moved
precious commodities including jade, goldwork, ceramics, dogs, salt, and drugs through
labyrinthine inland waterways, along the coast, and to the islands of the high seas.
3
The populations of the coastal estuaries were among the most complex, populous, and
developed settlements in the New World at the time of the arrival of the Europeans.
4
While the Indian wars did not figure as prominently in European occupation of this area
as elsewhere in the New World, the famously recalcitrant locals perhaps took their in-
the “landscapes of memory”—the travel routes of the natives—also included extensive
food forests able to support populations in ways largely invisible to Europeans and thus
madeautonomousforestpolitiesacentralfeatureofthemodernhistoryoftheCaribbean
Amazon. The muddy mangroves and swamp forests abhorred by colonists were both a
defense and a larder to the natives, and later helped support fugitive slaves.
6
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