In the best-studied areas in Santa Catarina and Rio de Janeiro, mound building tended to intensify towards the end of pre-ceramic times, apparently due to population growth. By about 2000 BP, there was a noticeable decrease in the use of shell and a switch to dark earth in final building stages. Cultural transitions correspond to this change in construction material. After the seventeenth century BP, monumental mound building processes ceased. Cemetery sites appeared with low earthen mounds over the graves. Both in the final earthen layers of sambaquis and these sites with small earthen mounds, ceramics are frequently present, usually in very small amounts (Rohr 1984; Schmitz et al. 1993, 1996; Fish et al. 2000;
For an exceptional site that extends significantly later in time and has abundant pottery in upper layers, see Bryan 1993).
Ecological transitions likewise are evident at the end of the sambaqui era. According to the curve for sea level changes in southern Santa Catarina (A. Kneip 2004; Angulo et al. 2005), the enclosure of open bays proceeded, involving the reduction of mangrove vegetation, and shellfish, and marine fish and mammals in the later lagoons. An increase in typical lagoon fish species in the upper layers of Jaboticabeira II (Klokler 2001) is a likely correlation. In combination with cultural change, the decreased use of shells for mound building may be related to decreased availability, particularly of berbigao. Also about 2,000 years ago, cultural change accelerated across central and eastern South America. Archaeological evidence throughout Brazil points to the expansion of agricultural societies and the emergence of complex systems of social organization, usually termed chiefdoms, especially along the Amazon River axis and its peripheries. Agriculturalists had arrived in central Brazil and on the southern coast by that time, and were undoubtedly involved in the disappearance of sambaqui traditions, although contact and assimilation varied across this very large area; in fact, northern sambaqui societies of the Salgado coast experienced this contact and transition by the fifth millennium BP (Simoes and Correa 1971).
In the state of Rio de Janeiro, a long contact period with Ge-speaking and other external groups (archaeologically indicated by Una ceramics) appears to have generated transitional sites (Cordeiro 2004). On the southern coast, the newly established cemetery sites with low earthen mounds have Itarare/Taquara ceramics attributed to southern Ge-speaking groups (Rohr1984; Bryan 1993). Inhabitants of these transitional sites no longer constructed monuments and followed different funerary rituals, but the technological and typological characteristics of their lithic and bone artifacts remained mostly unchanged from sambaqui predecessors, as did their intensive exploitation of aquatic resources. Although evidence is not yet strong for cultivation during the sambaqui era, dental evidence and the presence of ceramics convince most authors that these transitional sites were fully agricultural.
Tupi-speaking tribes also challenged long-lived sambaqui cultural domains on the southern coast at this time. Historical linguistics indicates that a Tupi diaspora (archaeologically indicated by diagnostic polychrome pottery) originated in Amazonia, although Brochado’s (1984) comprehensive archaeological model for such a diaspora has not yet been confirmed by consistent evidence. It is likely that Tupian newcomers forcefully absorbed former sambaqui territories, as their villages and campsites never co-occur with the terminal construction phases of shell mounds or culturally transitional sites. Ritually sanctioned aggression, including warfare and ceremonial cannibalism, was the basis of Tupi political power (Silva et al. 2004: 11) among widespread post-contact groups. Apparently at a very fast pace, they achieved technological and demographic superiority, becoming the dominant occupants of the coastal zones (see Chapter 33 in this volume). Ethnographically described as superb fishers, it is very likely that they incorporated the remarkable fishing technology that had supported sambaqui societies.
World History
