Pinturas rupestres e povos ceramistas

The territories that today make up Brazil were occupied by various peoples over thousands of years. About 6,000 years ago, nomadic hunter-gatherer cultures flourished. In the south of Brazil, for example, one of these cultures mastered hunting technologies: they built tools mainly out of stone, such as the bolas and arrowheads. Although researchers do not yet know whether these groups formed a single people, they were all called Umbu. It is believed that they lived in caves and also built dwellings on the surface, but there is no evidence of the shape of these dwellings. In addition to the Umbu people, there were other nomadic groups in other parts of the territory who used caves as housing. Many of them made cave paintings, which are important vestiges of their culture. Over time, there were also peoples who became sedentary, as they mastered hunting, agriculture and ceramic technologies. In places where there was an abundance of food, such as on the coast, the process of sedentarization was a little faster. At the same time that nomadic groups of hunters and gatherers were developing in the interior of present-day Brazil, there were sedentary groups that inhabited the coast between the current states of Pará and Rio Grande do Sul. On the banks of the rivers and the seashore, the main source of food for these groups were species of mollusks, such as oysters, clams and mussels, which are still common in our waters today. Of these, only the shells remained. Over time, the accumulation of these shells resulted in large mounds. Later, indigenous people speaking Tupi-Guarani called these places sambaquis, which means “mounds of shells”. Many of them are small, but some reach large dimensions, over twenty meters high and 100 meters in diameter. Ceramic peoples Around 4 thousand years ago, some people who inhabited the territories of present-day Brazil began to develop two technologies: agriculture and the manufacture of ceramic utensils. Ceramics is the technique of making clay objects that are fired. These objects allowed communities to store and transport food and also cook. For this reason, for many researchers, the presence of ceramic objects in an archaeological site may indicate that the people who produced them were also farmers. The oldest cultures of potters and farmers inhabited the Amazon rainforest. The Marajoara culture, on the island of Marajó, and the Santarém or Tapajônica culture, both in present-day Pará, on the banks of the Tapajós River, are two examples. Agricultural and ceramic practices spread throughout almost the entire territory a little less than 2 thousand years ago. Among the main remains are those of the Aratu culture, spread between the current states of São Paulo and Rio Grande do Norte, and those of the Itararé culture, in the current region of the Southeast. The practices of all these peoples influenced the cultures of the indigenous people who encountered the Portuguese in 1500. Text taken from the History textbook, published by SM, Aprender Juntos.