For a Landscape Archeology: mobility and rooting in American perspective

Abstract

The historiography of urbanization in colonial Brazil has largely focused on towns and cities rather than other types of settlements that fulfilled different roles. Localities, camps, chapels, parishes, townships, hamlets, indigenous villages, missionary settlements, landings, passages, barriers, farms and ranches, corrals and fortresses have been overshadowed by a rarefied network of towns and cities. Nor has this historiography examined the multifaceted web of routes between clusters , such as the rivers and waterways, highways and byways, and trails that facilitated or hindered interregional traffic and contacts across obstructive and pluralistic physical geography that even today characterizes our diverse cultural landscape. A series of maps are used to reweave a mesh that had been lost in time; contemporary IT resources enable more detailed quantitative studies that will surely underpin a more detailed qualitative focus on everyday dynamics and practices, the timing and distances involved in journeys between localities, difficulties for contact, varying flows of watercourses, barriers imposed by topography and vegetation, or by human groups, rest-overs and tolls, etc. An overview of certain maps may reconcile notions such as "network" and "urban" in colonial Brazil by analyzing general aspects and regional specificities, varying scales, modalities and temporalities, thus posing new hypotheses about settlement and mobility in the historical process of occupying and exploring colonial territory. Studies of this nature undertaken by new researcher cohorts may help answer the question posed by this article: to what extent was Brazil’s colonization more urban and less archipelagic than it appeared to be at first sight?