In research on Guarani subsistence practices (Noelli 1993b), to which I applied a broader integration between archaeological, linguistic, historical, ethnographic, ethnobiological, and ecological data, I was able to conclude that the Tupi were highly sedentary. A consequence of the territorial expansion must have been demographic growth and the breaking-up of villages. The people whose lands were claimed must have resisted expansion, in turn implying interethnic relationships, bellicose and friendly.
Concomitantly, the management of crops and plant-gathering directly influenced the rhythm of expansion. The Tupi transported their plants, introducing them to all the regions in which they settled; they also took up new vegetables. These processes required investment by the Tupi in what we can call “research time” and in preparing the environment, in transforming the primary forest into known and productive areas (Balee 1994). The life cycle of plants is another factor in the rhythm of expansions.
As a village could not occupy new lands without their prior preparation, it could not move into far-away territory. The expansion must have taken place not by leaps, but through the slow and continuous annexation of lands immediately adjacent to the occupied territories, as ethnobiological studies of tropical and subtopical peoples have been demonstrating.
The key issue that allows us to understand the variables conditioning the Tupi expansions is related to territoriality, with its social units marked by consanguineous relations and alliances, what is called tekohd in Guarani (Noelli 1993b; Melia 1986). The corresponding term in Tupinamba is tecoaba (VLB: 127).
Tekoha is the territory that corresponds to a village, with its hunting and fishing grounds, its crops, its natural resources for gathering and for raw materials, delimited by geographical elements and predominantly exploited by the group occupying these lands.
Under normal conditions, dwellings would change within the managed lands of a tekoha.
The formation of a new tekoha depended on the division of an original village, rather than its abandonment.
Archaeology and linguistics provide some evidence that these peoples remained in the same place, from which they slowly broke up. Several Guarani lands show a continuous occupation for over 1,500 years, and Tupian lands for over 1,000 years, in a permanence that may indicate a slower rhythm of movement. Several groups of Tupian people may have lived for at least 5,000 years in the Guapore basin and adjacent regions.
World History
