- Ocara-Açu, a vast precolonial Amazon settlement, underlies the modern-day city of Santarém in Brazil, once serving as the core of a regional network that may have housed up to 60,000 people before the invasion of Europeans.
- Occasionally, Santarém’s rich Indigenous heritage surfaces through the cracks in the urban concrete, although archaeological sites have disappeared as a result of urban expansion, agriculture, and the construction of a soy terminal by commodities giant Cargill.
- Archaeological discoveries in the Santarém region challenge the long-held belief that the Amazon was too harsh to sustain large, complex human cultures, revealing a radically different urban paradigm.
SANTARÉM, Brazil — Praça Rodrigues dos Santos has seen better days. The triangular plaza at the center of Santarém is broken and filled with potholes and piles of garbage.
Amid the trees stands the statue of a priest. His right arm seems disproportionately large, and he holds a bible under his left arm. Next to the statue is a small pillar, too damaged to read the text on it. The plaque underneath the robed figure offers solace.
“In this place used to be Ocara-Açu [the large terrain] of the Tupaiu or Tapajós indians,” it reads in Portuguese. “Here, on the day of June 22, 1661, the Jesuit father João Felipe Betendorf installed the mission of Our Lady of the Conception, which gave birth to the city of Santarém.”
Praça Rodrigues dos Santos is the historic heart of the city, the place where it all began. Yet anyone passing the site would be forgiven for thinking it was just a parking lot.
Overlooking the Tapajós River, one of the largest tributaries to the mightiest river of them all — the Amazon — Santarém is home to some 330,000 people. Its façade has long been dominated by the hundreds of fishing boats and ferries docked along the shore. Since 2003, the enormous Cargill soy terminal has been an added feature to the urban silhouette.
Away from the happy hustle and bustle along the river, the city is a rather nondescript concrete jungle with few highlights to please visitors. Most don’t spend much time in Santarém, and instead head straight to the beautiful beaches and forests of nearby Alter do Chão.
When U.S. naturalist Herbert Smith traveled in the Tapajós region in the 1870s, it struck him that “every little point and bay” still had an Indigenous name. In his travelogue, Brazil, the Amazons and the Coast, he expressed the hope that “the Brazilians” would keep these names “instead of putting saints’ names and theological phrases in their place.”
It seems the people of Santarém never read the book. Apart from the river and the boulevard, both named after the Tapajós people, the mention of Ocara-Açu at Praça Rodrigues dos Santos is one of the rare public references to the Indigenous culture that once thrived here.
“The city has very little eye for the past, which includes the colonial past,” Claide de Paula Morais, a professor of archaeology at the Santarém campus of the Federal University of Western Para (UFOPA), tells Mongabay. “Considering it’s a city over 350 years old, what’s there to see [in terms of history]? Very little.”
Santarém celebrates June 22, 1661, the day Father Betendorf laid the first stone for his chapel, as the city’s founding date. Yet he himself named the mission after the Indigenous community that was already there: “Aldeia dos Tapajós” (Village of the Tapajós). Only in 1758 was the growing settlement renamed Santarém, after the Portuguese city of the same name.
Sitting in the Curt Nimuendajú Archaeology Laboratory at the leafy UFOPA campus close to the Cargill terminal, Morais says he’s not sure why Santarém retains virtually no memory of the past.
“The north of Brazil has long been regarded as somewhat backward and separate from the rest of the country,” he tells Mongabay. “Perhaps the urge to modernize and move forward is part of an attempt to belong.
“But whatever the reason, the fact is that most of the city’s past lies buried under a layer of concrete and asphalt,” he adds. “And, as the city expanded, no one ever thought about preserving part of the past in the urban layout by, say, keeping old names or creating an archaeological park.”
The João Fona Cultural Center in Santarém showcases a small collection of precolonial artifacts, such as stone axes, arrowheads, funeral urns and some replicas of the ceramics the region has become famous for. However, the most exquisite examples of the “Santarém culture” are found elsewhere, in Brazil and outside.
History speaks volumes
In 1542, Francisco de Orellana was the first European to meet the Tapajós people. When the Spanish conquistador and his crew sailed across the mouth of the Tapajós River, they were met by a flotilla of large canoes, each carrying some 20 to 30 warriors.
They welcomed him with a rain of arrows. Orellana steered away from the hostile flotilla and the numerous settlements he saw on shore. Continuing his journey downstream, he would become the first European to sail the entire length of the Amazon River.
Later encounters with the European newcomers went worse for the Tapajós and other Indigenous peoples living in the region. Over the years, war, disease and slave raids took a heavy toll.
Still, when João Betendorf arrived in 1661, what he dubbed Aldeia dos Tapajós remained a sizable community. The Luxembourg-born priest wrote in his diary that he was received by the chiefs of five tribes, including the Tapajós.
Among them was a noblewoman named Maria Moacana, who served as an adviser or oracle. After some debate, the friar was allowed to build his chapel at Ocara-Açu.
“As in Indigenous communities elsewhere in Brazil, Ocara-Açu was a large open space at the center of the settlement,” Morais says. “It was used for such activities as ceremonies, festivities and funerals. Part of the square was used as a burial ground for the local elite.”
Over time, Christian leaders increasingly cracked down on what they deemed heathen practices. They destroyed cemeteries and banned burial rituals. It’s thought that the landmark Nosso Senhora da Conceição (Our Lady of Conception) cathedral in Santarém was built on top of an ancient burial site.
In 1662, Mauricio de Heriarte published an account of his journey through the Amazon. It includes a chapter dedicated to “the province of the Tapajós,” offering further glimpses of what life may have looked like at the time.
According to Heriarte, the province was densely populated by the Tapajós and numerous other tribes. It was dominated by a large settlement at the mouth of the river: Aldeia dos Tapajós.
The people lived in ranchos of 20 to 30 families led by a chieftain, supervised by a higher-ranking chieftain, “who is much obeyed.” They gathered fruits and grew corn and manioc.
Heriarte went on to write in some detail about the singing, dancing and drinking that took place, part of what he called “devil-worshiping.”
Such historical accounts have long since been ignored or dismissed as medieval fantasy, especially when the 20th-century notion of environmental determinism took hold. This cemented the dogma that the Amazon Basin had always been thinly populated, as the rainforest was considered too harsh and infertile to support complex human culture.
From the 1970s onward, anthropologists and archaeologists increasingly turned that prevailing theory on its head, showing that the human presence in the Amazon is much older and much more dominant than previously thought. In the early 1990s, Anna Roosevelt found the remains of stone tools, charcoal, food and painting materials near Monte Alegre, 120 kilometers (75 miles) from Santarém. The items dated back approximately 11,000 years.
Findings like these directly contradicted the dominant theory of determinism, which posited that the first humans entered the Americas around 11,000 years ago, gradually migrating south from Alaska, and that their presence in the Amazon Basin came only in the last 2,000 years. Roosevelt’s evidence demonstrated that people were already actively hunting, gathering and painting complex cave art in the Amazonian heartland much earlier.
Southeast of Santarém, at the headwaters of another great Amazon tributary, the Xingu, U.S. anthropologist Michael Heckenberger unveiled a complex of “garden cities” — an elaborate network of interconnected towns and villages that may have been home to up to 50,000 people. More recently, using lidar, a laser-based remote-sensing technology, researchers revealed a vast urban complex consisting of more than 6,000 earthen platforms in the Upano Valley in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
These revelations established the Amazon’s crucial cultural value, not just its natural significance. Led by Brazilian archaeologist Eduardo Neves, a group of scientists is advocating for the designation of archaeological sites as cultural monuments, not just as environmental jewels. This status would provide these sites with a new layer of legal protection within the rainforest. Neves says that as many as 10 million people may have lived in the Amazon prior to the European conquest, and it had everything to do with agriculture in the Amazon, “a center for agrobiological diversity.”
The initiative seeks to preserve these sites and ensure that local communities can continue to inhabit the region. Neves compares the cultural importance of these sites to that of the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, arguing that they deserve similar levels of recognition and safeguarding for their archaeological importance.
Many of these discoveries have been made with lidar, in which laser beams are fired from aircraft or even satellites to penetrate dense vegetation and give a glimpse of structures that lie hidden beneath. Much of Santarém’s surface, however, has been covered by concrete, and excavations are the primary method to uncover the city’s past.
A different view
The concrete jungle of Santarém may not spark the same level of imagination as “lost and found civilizations” in the rainforest do. However, as with the Xingu garden cities and the Upano Valley culture, the city has played a key role in the rewriting of Amazonian history, which started as early as the late 19th century — yet was long overlooked.
In the 1870s, U.S. naturalist Herbert Smith and Canadian geologist Charles Hartt noted the overwhelming presence of terra preta (black earth) in the Santarém region. For thousands of years, Indigenous people have produced a type of very fertile dark soil by adding things such as charcoal, organic material manure and pottery to plant trees and grow crops.
The first to excavate in and around Santarém was the German anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú, after whom the UFPOA archaeological center is named.
Nimuendajú was born in Germany in 1883 as Curt Unckel. He traveled to Brazil at age 20, and thereafter dedicated the rest of his life to archaeology and anthropology. The name Nimuendajú was bestowed on him by a Guarani tribe he lived with for two years. It translates to “he who made himself a home.” When he gained Brazilian citizenship, he adopted that as his surname.
Nimuendajú’s interest in the Tapajós region was first triggered when a German priest told him that the children of Santarém played with pieces of ancient pottery that could be found all over the place.
From 1922 onward, Nimuendajú led numerous excavations in and around the city. His work ultimately resulted in the groundbreaking 1939 manuscript The Tapajós.
“Between 1925 and 1926, I located 26 ancient Indian settlements, all belonging to the Tapajós culture,” he wrote. “Yet, I believe it does not represent even half of the sites to be found.”
The Tapajós settlements Nimuendajú found were all built on higher ground to safeguard them against flooding. Every hilltop he researched had a layer of black earth up to 1.5 meters (5 feet) thick. He also mentioned a network of roads “which run almost in a straight line from one black earth deposit to another.”
About the Santarém city center, he wrote: “Considering that for over 200 years pedestrians, animals and vehicles have crushed the surface daily, it is remarkable that objects are still found in such good condition.”
Nimuendajú unearthed many of the ceramics Santarém has become known for. Today, these fragments are found in museums in Gothenburg, Leipzig and Los Angeles, as well as the Emilio Goeldi Museum in Belém, capital of Pará state, which includes Santarém.
The National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, too, once held a collection of vases, statuettes and muiraquitas (amulets). But these were lost in the devastating 2018 fire and today only exist in digital form, along with the Nimuendajú archive.
More than 200 archaeological sites
Many archaeologists, both Brazilian and foreign, followed in Nimuendajú’s footsteps, turning Santarém and its surroundings into one of the most researched and best-documented regions in the Amazon Basin.
“There are more than 200 known archaeological sites in and around Santarém,” says Morais, the UFOPA archaeology professor. “The oldest found objects date back some 3,000 years, but we have strong reasons to believe that the human presence is much older.”
First of all, there’s Santarém’s favorable location. The city lies at the confluence of the clear-water Tapajós and the muddy Amazon, while a bit farther north is the influx of the Trombetas and Nhamunda rivers, which produce rich fishing grounds and extensive flood plains.
In addition, the rainforest provides wood, fruits, nuts and bountiful hunting, while the region is rich in materials such as sand and stone, the latter not always a given in the Amazon.
Second, objects found in the shell mound of Taperinha, some 90 km (56 mi) south of Santarém, and the caves of Monte Alegre, first excavated by Anna Roosevelt, date back 9,000 and 11,000 years, respectively.
“There used to be a shell mound similar to the one in Taperinha on the coast of Santarém, but it was used to construct homes before archaeologists were able to do any research,” Morais says.
Today, the main archaeological sites within Santarém are Aldeia, located within the city center, and Porto, near the Cargill terminal.
“They were divided in two because there used to be a small stream separating them,” Morais says. “Yet, today we believe it used to be one big settlement some 3 kilometers [nearly 2 mi] long. It was the nucleus in a regional mosaic of settlements, fields and forest.”
Roosevelt researched the Porto site, he adds. “It was mainly residential with a large open square, like Ocara-Açu, houses and a nearby cemetery. We found many daily life objects, lots of jewelry and thousands of fine tools to make jewelry. Perhaps people used to make and sell jewelry.”
While Aldeia lies buried under churches and centuries of urban expansion in the heart of Santarém, Porto was largely destroyed by the construction of the Cargill soy terminal.
“I first saw the Porto site in 1980 or 1981,” Roosevelt tells Mongabay. “I walked over it and observed that the entire surface was covered with black earth full of archaeological artifacts.”
According to Roosevelt, the findings were dismissed by the companies that run the port, following a very limited survey in scope, which didn’t meet scientific standards. “In 2009, our follow-up found that the entire area had intact archaeological artifacts, features and constructs,” she says. “The site that was destroyed to house Cargill contained almost the entire sequence of Amazonian prehistory.”
Mongabay reached out to Cargill, which denied the allegations. “The archaeological survey carried out by the company, as well as the entire licensing process of Cargill’s terminal, strictly followed the guidelines of the state environmental licensing authority at the time,” Cargill claimed by email. “The survey found no fragments of historical relevance at the site and recommended authorization for the construction of the port” (read the full answer).
Bigger than Rio
To imagine what Aldeia dos Tapajós looked like before it became Santarém, we must let go of the typical European model of urbanism: a village or town surrounded by meadows for livestock and fields to grow vegetables and grains.
If there’s one thing that the archaeology of the Amazon shows, it’s that the precolonial boundaries between village and city, nature and culture, were much more fluid.
“The region was characterized by a radically different urbanism,” Márcio Amaral, an archaeologist at the Mamirauá Institute, in neighboring Amazonas state, tells Mongabay by phone. According to him, even the term “Aldeia dos Tapajós” is misleading, as it wasn’t just a “village.”
“Ocara-Açu was arguably home to some 3,000 to 5,000 people prior to the European conquest,” Amaral says. As a comparison, he points to Rio de Janeiro, which in 1660 was home to some 7,000 people, most of them Indigenous. That made the “village” of Aldeia dos Tapajós nearly as big as the city of Rio.
“I worked on excavations on the other side of the Tapajós River, and we found remains of a settlement as big as Ocara-Açu was,” Amaral said. “It’s important to understand that Ocara-Açu didn’t exist on its own. It was the core of a network of interconnected settlements, fields and forests. I believe the region may have been home to up to some 60,000 people at the time.
“Western thinking regarding the Amazon is full of pejoratives,” he adds. “That includes science. How can it be that the official term for the region’s famous Indigenous ceramics still is ‘Santarém culture,’ while the city was only named as such in the 17th century?”
A question of identity
The past isn’t just absent from today’s Santarém streetscape. According to anthropologist Florêncio Vaz, Indigenous people in and around the city have also long been “invisible,” regarded as a relic of the past.
Born in 1964 in the village of Pinhel on the left bank of the Tapajós River, Vaz belongs to the Maytapu people and is the founder of the Indigenous Consciousness Group (GCI). At UFOPA, he teaches about Indigenous culture and identity.
“Since the late 1990s, there has been a gradual Indigenous reawakening,” he tells Mongabay. “Communities started to organize themselves ethnically, culturally and politically, and increasingly have made their presence felt.”
Vaz points to recent protests in Belém against changes to the Indigenous education system, and to the blockade by the Munduruku people of the BR-163 highway over controversial legislation that sets a cutoff date for Indigenous peoples to file territorial claims. Under this so-called marco temporal (time frame) law, they don’t have a valid claim if they weren’t occupying the land as of Oct. 5, 1988, the day Brazil’s Constitution was enacted.
Vaz says a growing number of people are now seeking out their ancestral roots. In the 2022 census, 16,955 inhabitants of Santarém declared themselves to be of Indigenous descent. That’s less than 5% of the city’s population, yet the highest since the census began.
In the region around Santarém, the proportion was even higher; in nearby Belterra, almost 10% of the population identified as being of Indigenous descent, while in Aveiro it was more than 17%.
“Due to almost 400 years of colonization, which banned religion, rituals, language and parts of the culture, most Indigenous people today are Christian and speak Portuguese,” Vaz says. “But there has been a reinvention of Indigenous culture. For example, dancing, singing and drinking continue to play an important role in Christian holidays.”
While people are increasingly aware that the Indigenous past is hardly present in today’s Santarém, Vaz says cultural recognition isn’t the main struggle for the Indigenous movement at the moment. “Demarcation, education and health care are the priorities,” he says.
Still, when the Santarém municipal government in January 2022 moved to build a shopping center at Praça Rodrigues dos Santos, the Indigenous population protested, with the support of the academic community and countless local sympathizers. They were determined not to see the plaza destroyed.
Vaz helped produce a video in which inhabitants of the city, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, shared memories and explained what the plaza represented to them, both personally and culturally.
Soon after the first trees were felled at the plaza, the municipality, which hadn’t consulted the population about its plans, was stopped in its tracks. After centuries of bulldozing forward, changing the historical heart of the city proved a bridge too far for the powers that be in Santarém.
For some, that’s given rise to a tantalizing possibility: Perhaps, just perhaps, the next step in honoring the past will be to one day rename the plaza in the city center “Ocara-Açu.”
Banner image: Seen through Santarém’s fish auction: ocean-faring vessel being loaded at the Cargill soy terminal. Image by Peter Speetjens.
Soy crops squeeze Amazon park with 11,000-year-old rock paintings in Brazil
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