Vivências Tupi na Chapada do Araripe: entre o ritualismo e o cotidiano

Abstract

The thesis was based on the hypothesis that the materiality of the Tupí populations, together with the study of the landscape, ethnographic and ethnohistorical data, and long-term indigenous history, provide valuable information about the experiences of these peoples in semi-arid environments. Traditionally, the families of the Tupí linguistic trunk have been studied in terms of their origins and expansion routes from the Amazonian areas to the coastal and tropical regions. In this context, the objective of the research was to map the experiences of indigenous peoples before the full European incursion into the Chapada do Araripe region, focusing on the daily and ritual practices shared throughout the history of these communities, especially in the Northeast. To achieve this objective, the research was based on the identification of “recurring patterns”, aligned with technological and morphological attributes, in association with the marks of use, of the recovered materiality, according to the perspective of Skibo (2015), correlating them with the topographic profiles of the areas of intra-site wanderings of eight selected archaeological sites. These sites are located in the municipality of Caldeirão Grande do Piauí, on the border with the states of Ceará and Pernambuco, more precisely at the top of Chapada, in areas with altitudes higher than 700 meters in relation to sea level. The methodology adopted included the mapping of the areas between the archaeological sites using GPS coordinates, aerial images, GIS programs, in addition to the reinterpretation of the places using AI, enabling intra- and inter-site spatial analyses. This approach aimed to understand the landscape, the places and the temporality in which the sites are inserted. In addition, bibliographical references, images and contexts about the plateau were collected, which led us to use the perspective of archaeological artifacts, the presence or absence of river areas that may have served as flows for human and non-human activities, according to the perspectives of Landscape Archaeology and the concepts of place of Thomas (2001), in collaboration with the ideas of Ingold (1993), Tilley (2014) and Bender (2002). The analysis of the materiality recovered through technological and morphological studies allowed inferences about the organization and correlation of these experiences in the aspects of the landscape and place, with the aim of understanding the diversity of human and non-human experiences. As a result, potential maps of possible experiences in the landscape were created.