Terminology used for population shifts of the Tupi has regarded these shifts simply as migrations—a moving from one place to another, abandoning the original region. This term is appropriate for the movement that the Tupi undertook when pressed by other people, for instance the migrations after AD 1500 when they sought to escape the Europeans (see Metraux 1927).
But the term “migration” does not adequately cover those Tupian peoples who moved in other ways, possibly for other reasons, such as demographic growth, the breaking-up of villages, forestry management, and so on. According to archaeological studies, the Tupi held possession of their domains for long periods, expanding to new territories without abandoning old ones (Brochado 1984; Scatamacchia 1990; Noelli 1993b). Studies in ethnobiology and native South American history demonstrate that territories under the domain of some Tupian people were slowly conquered, managed, and tapped for a long time in an important aspect of expansion (Noelli 1993a, 1993b), the better term for these population shifts. Expansion means spreading, a conquering of new regions without migration’s implication of an abandonment of previous territory.
The geographical detection of prehistoric routes of movement depends on relating the location of archaeological sites to their dates. From site location and radiocarbon dates, Brochado (1973) detailed a “migration” schema for the regions surveyed by PRONAPA, with the “Tupiguarani” expansions occurring in two “migratory waves,” one prehistoric and one after the European arrival. The first wave was represented by pottery, known as the Pintada Subtradition, the second by the Corrugated Subtradition. After European contact, the Corrugated Subtradition transformed into the Brushed Subtradition, another subtradition characterized in its ceramic expression by the predominance of a certain surface finish. Afterward, in his dissertation (Brochado 1984: 69-77) and at several scientific congresses, Brochado completely refuted the existence of these subtraditions: it had all resulted from confusion created by the indiscriminate mixture of Guarani and Tupinamba pottery.
Lathrap (1970: 75-78, fig. 5), amalgamating archaeological, linguistic and ethnographic data (principally the archaeological data), proposed a radial expansion of the Tupi based on geographical distribution. This rather synthetic and deductive model led to intellectual conflict with the PRONAPA archaeologists, including Meggers. Although Lathrap’s field methodology was not very different from PRONAPA’s, his work was driven by different theoretical conceptions.
Meggers and Evans (1973) proposed that from an origin east of the Madeira River the Tupi expanded towards the south of Brazil and then to the north (Meggers 1972: 129, 1975, 1976, 1982; Meggers and Evans 1973, 1978: figs. 7, 8; Meggers et al. 1988: fig. 5).
But she did not mention the full comparative archaeological analysis concerning the Tupi. Instead, the stratigraphical sequences of the middle-lower Amazon were privileged and sequences from outside Amazonia were excluded. At the same time that Meggers assumed an “incapacity of lexico-statistical methods to reveal earlier locations of speakers of akin languages,” she and Evans (1976: 60) based arguments about Tupi expansion on historical linguistics and historical information analyzed earlier by Metraux (1927).
Following Lathrap, Brochado (1984:2-39) matched internal divisions of the Tupi stock, from Proto-Tupi to historic languages and dialects, to the model of evolution and differentiation of Amazonian pottery (Lathrap 1970; Brochado and Lathrap 1982). After observing the Proto-Tupi divisions proposed by Rodrigues (1964) and Lemle (1971), Bro-chado verified the correspondences, considering that material and linguistic differentiations must have been concomitant. Since then Brochado has seen the need to expand regional investigations and the multidisciplinary links that ensure consistent results for each Tupian group (Jose Brochado, personal communication, 1993).
Brochado (1984, 1989) hypothesizes that Proto-Tupi resulted when the makers of the Guarita Tradition pottery (of the Amazonian Polychrome Tradition) split, somewhere in central Amazonia. Based on historical linguistic assumptions, he considered the differentiation of languages and of pottery to have resulted from the spatial temporal splitting of Proto-Tupi, caused by continuous demographic growth in the heart of Amazonia. This division links the Guarani to the pottery of western Amazonia, and the Tupinamba to that of eastern Amazonia. The expansion is seen as having two periods, a first alongside the principal rivers, a second colonizing the smaller tributaries.
In the case of the Guarani, colonizations followed a north-south direction, from Amazonia to the mouth of the River Plate, through the courses of the Parana, Paraguay, and Uruguay rivers; there are sites from Corumba (Peixoto 1995) to Buenos Aires. To the east, the Tupinamba, leaving the mouth of the Amazon, followed the coastline as far as Sao Paulo, moving up the Atlantic rivers into the hinterlands.
Brochado (1984; Brochado and Lathrap 1982) concluded that the Guarani pottery in the Guarita tradition lost decorative techniques—modelling, excision and incision in fine and long lines—during the southward expansions outside Amazonia, through the Maderia and Guapore rivers. Bowls with everted and thickened rims disappear; labial and medial flanges replace decoration of the Guarita tradition. New, cone-shaped pans and jars resulted from contact with pottery-makers from eastern Bolivia and Peru. This characteristic Guarani pottery—both archaeological and historical—has a complex or inflected contour, developed waist and/or horizontal segmentation; corrugated or painted, it is utilized secondarily as burial urns.
There is no archaeological record for the Tupi of the lower Amazon. Brochado proposed that from their center of origin the Tupinamba shifted eastwards through the middle course of the river and, leaving its mouth, moved southwards to colonize the coastline as far as the Tropic of Capricorn. Some constituent features of Tupinamba pottery are found in the lower Amazon and in the Marajora style. These features appear on most of the open pots, including those with oval and quadrangular mouths, and the polychromatic paint concentrated on the everted and thickened rims (features not occurring in the Maderia-Guapore and Parana-Paraguay basins). This pottery does not include most of the closed shapes, principally anthropomorphic, nor the incision, excision, or modelling techniques. From comparisons between Tupinamba and Marajoara pottery and the indication that the Tupinamba had occupied the lower Amazon, Brochado and I suggest that Marajoara pottery may derive from Tupinamba pottery (Brochado and Noelli n. d.).
Comparing shape and decoration, Brochado (1984) demonstrated that Tupinamba pottery could not have evolved and unfolded outside Amazonia, next to Paraguay, as was proposed in the nineteenth century. Nor was it dispersed first southwards and then to the north of Brazil, as suggested by Meggers: there is no material evidence of a sequence outside Amazonia, in eastern South America. What is fundamental in Brochado’s work is his proposal, since 1984, of a specific Tupinamba Subtradition, used exclusively by Tupinamba speakers, that differentiates them from the other Tupi groups. The Guarani Subtradition remains intact (Brochado 1984).
Linguistic work published after Brochado’s 1984 dissertation (e. g., Rodrigues 1984-85, 1986) makes it unlikely that the Tupinamba colonized the Brazilian coast and hinterlands from Paraguay to the south of Brazil and then moved towards northeastern/ northern Brazil. Considered the most ancient language of the Tupi-Guarani family (Jensen 1989:13), the Tupinamba could not have derived from the Guarani, the only Tupian-speaking pottery-makers south of Sao Paulo. Relations between Tupinamba and Kokama may explain and confirm the origin of the Tupinamba, if it can be determined whether the Kokama belongs to Tupian stock or is a Tupian language, adopted by a group of non-Tupian people. Kokama and Tupinamba share characteristics absent from languages of the Tupi-Guarani family south of the Amazon River, in the Madeira-Tapajos, Tocantins-Araguaia and Xingu regions. This strengthens Brochado’s hypothesis that the Tupinamba expansions started in the lower Amazon and followed the Atlantic coastline southwards.
If Tupinamba pottery derives from Guarani pottery, moving beyond the Paranap-anema in a south-to-north diffusion, it changed drastically to include shapes and surface finish techniques absent from southern Brazil. How did this occur, if constituent elements of the Tupinamba pottery originated exclusively in Amazonia? Brochado has proposed several scenarios (Brochado 1984, personal communication 1990), but recognizes that ultimately the issue will be resolved only by more information about the Tupi.
Linguist Greg Urban (1992: 92-93) has proposed an expansion hypothesis, based on the Rodrigues (1945 through 1986) and Lemle (1971) studies. He connects linguistic derivation more explicitly to geographical expansion. Using exclusively linguistic data, Urban divides the expansion into two successive stages, in terms of distance from the origin, according to the Rodrigues (1964) chronology.
Urban’s first stage occurred 5,000 to 3,000 years ago and corresponded to the early division and expansion of the Tupian stock (which Urban calls Macro-Tupi) in the center-western region of Brazil, between the Madeira and the Xingu rivers, as far as the Amazon River, with more concentration and diversity in Rondonia.
Urban’s second stage occurred 3,000 to 2,000 years ago and is no longer associated with the early Tupi expansion. It corresponds to the geographical expansion of the Tupi-Guarani family.
Urban also suggests a third recent phase of expansion, ca. AD 1000 (but we now know that date is incorrect in light of older radiocarbon dates: see below). In Urban’s scheme the recent expansion is no longer associated with the early Tupi expansion, but rather with the expansion of Chiriguano and Guarayo speakers to Bolivia, the Tapiete and Guarani to Paraguay, and the ‘Kaingwa’ to the region between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil. Finally, the Tupinamba, Tupiniquin and Potiguara settled down on the Brazilian coast. They were originally speakers of the same language of “Tupiguarani, not to be mistaken with the family which is much wider” (Urban 1992: 92).
Arguing that the Tupi-Guarani family started its expansion “somewhere between the Madeira and the Xingu rivers,” Urban suggested that the first derivation must have
Occurred toward the Amazon River, through the Kokama and the Omagua, who shifted to the Amazon River. “About the same time,” the Guaiaki moved southwards, reaching Paraguay, while the Siriono moved southwestwards, as far as Bolivia. This movement was followed by Pauserna and Kawahib (Parintintin) speakers westwards; the Kayabi and Kamayura alongside the Xingu; the Xeta towards the south of Brazil; the Tapirape, Ten-etehara and, perhaps, Wayampi moving as far as Guyana, into a region close to the mouth of the Amazon (Urban 1992: 92). Gallois (1986: 77-85) shows that the Wayampi arrived in Guyana in the seventeenth century, much later than Urban suggests; they migrated from the Xingu when pushed out by Luso-Brazilian slave hunters.
By stating that there had been a language called Tupi-Guarani, Urban revives a nomenclature resolved in the late 1940s, since from when Tupi-Guarani has referred to a linguistic family rather than a language. I argue it is more appropriate to talk of a “proto”-Tupi-Guarani, the language from which the current languages of the Tupi-Guarani family originated.
World History
