53. Relatives in South America

54. Possible Relatives in the Americas

Monte Alegre sites (Para, Brazil)

by George Weber

Table of Contents

General introduction

Gruta (or Caverna) da Pedra Pintada

Serra da Lua

Gruta Itatupaoca

General Introduction

black dot: the State capital, Belem

red dot: the Monte Alegre area

Location of the Monte Alegre sites

The Monte Alegre sites are located at the southern edge of a geological formation called the "Domo de Monte Alegre" which is an oval roughly 30 km along is long and 16 km along is short axis.

Serra do Erere sites and landmarks:

1. Serra da Lua
2.Gruta Itatupaoca
3. Alto da Pedra Mirante

Serra do Paituna sites and landmarks:

4. Fonte do Miritiepe
5. Gruta do Miritiepe 1
6. Gruta do Miritiepe 2
7.Gruta da Arapua 1
8. Gruta da Arapua 2
9. Paituna Road site
10. Abrigo da Curuja
11. Gruta Quize do Marco
12. Pedra do Pilão
13. Gruta do Labirinto13.
14. Pedra Pintada do Pilão
15. Gruta (or Caverna) da Pedra Pintada

Height contours:
Meters above sea level

Many of the illustrations, maqps and informations in this section have come from the remarkably informative (despite its deadly-dull title) work "Diagnóstico de Potencial Ecotourístico do Município de Monte Alegre", published by J.V. Carmo, Prefeito Municipal, in 1999, at a time incidentally when "ecotourism" was not much in fashion yet. The work is available on the internet - click here.

Left:
Pedra do Mirante, the highest rock (220 m above sea level) in the Serra do Ererê where all the major archaeological sites of the area are located.

Right:
The Pedra do Cogumelo (Mushroom stone).The area has a number of such strange geological forms caused by wind erosion - not human agency! (the Pedra do Pilão mentioned on the map above is another such)

Monte Alegre town in 1999, with the Amazon river visible on the horizon.

At the well-named Cachoeira do Paraiso the water has a drop of 8 m.

But let us let us return to our main subject, archaeology:

The multiple sites of Monte Alegre were first discovered and described by the 19th century British naturalist and rival of Charles Darwin , Alfred Russel Wallace. He explored the Amazon during his travels in South America 1848-1852. The famous "Wallace-line" in Indonesia/Papua-Newguinea separating the Asian from the Newguinean-Australian biosphere (see Chapter 25, subchapter 6 on this web-site) was discovered by and named after him.

The discoverer and the re-discoverer of the
Monte Alegre sites:

Left:
Alfred Russel Wallace
(1823-1913 )

Right:
Anna Roosevelt
of the Field Museum
of Natural History in Chicago and
the University of Illinois, USA.
The archaeologist, incidentally,
is the great-grand-daughter of
American president Theodore Roosevelt.

The Monte Alegre site was re-discovered in the 1980s and then excavated professionally by the US archeologist Anna Roosevelt. She had been searching the Amazon area for archaeological sites since 1983. In the late 1980s she heard about cave paintings and unusual stone tools in the area around Monte Alegreand was told that the stone tools found were different from the Clovis-style tools of northern America. At that time, many US archaeologists were absolutely certain that Clovis was the technology of the earliest humans in the Americas (see "Clovis first") and that there could be nothing earlier. The unClovis-like tools reportedly found at Monte Alegre therefore had to be (it was thought) later than Clovis.

In 1988 Roosevelt had a look herself at the sites near Monte Alegre. These were in the sandstone hills of the Serra do Ererê rising above the floodplains of the Amazon river.On the day of her arrival, a local teacher and about 30 students led her directly to the Gruta da Pedra Pintada. What she saw there on that first day and later what she discovered in her own excavations contributed to the long-overdue ofend of the "Clovis First" theory.

Anna Roosevelt in front of her new challenge, the Gruta da Pedra Pintada in 1988.

1. Gruta da Pedra Pintada

The Gruta da Pedra Pintadaa is the richest and most important of the Monte Alegre sites.

Map of the Gruta da Pedra Pintada.

Pink marks the location of the rock paintings.

The cave provided Anna Roosevelt and her team with sealed and clearly stratified layers containing seqences of increasingly ancient layers going right down to an oldest layer which turned out to be a palaeoindian campsite of tropical hunter-gatherers.

As Anna Roosevelt wrote:

The Paleo-Indian layers were full of carbonized wood and the pits and nutshells of the fruits of evergreen tropical forest and seasonal woodland trees and palms that still grow in the region today. Among them was the highly important economic species Brazil nut, Bertholletia excelsa, and other trees: Sacoglottis guianensis, Mouriri apiranga, Byrsonima crispa, numerous palms (Attalea spp. and Astro•caryum spp.), and tree legumes (Hymenea, c.f., parvifolia and oblongifolia).2 The faunal remains were poorly preserved but highly diverse: taxa included fish, tortoises, turtles, toads, snakes, shellfish, small and medium-sized rodents, bats, and very rare large mammals (probably ungulates). Many of the reptiles and rodents were juveniles. Fish, the most common fauna, included very large fishes (1.5 m) to very small ones (10 cm); species ranged from Hoplias malabaricus to Arapaima gigas, and there were numerous unidentified catfishes, characins, and cichlids. The fact that none of the plant or animal species are particularly adapted to cold, desert, or grass savanna environment confirmed that this was indeed a tropical forest adaptation, as did the carbon isotope patterns. The presence of several tree species considered to be adapted to human disturbance suggests that the Paleo-Indian occupation may have already begun to have an impact on the character of the forest.* The camp was apparently visited at different times of the year, for the tree species found in the cave tend to fruit in the rainy season today but the fish fauna and turtles are most accessible in the dry season and seasonal transitions, at least today. Today, men tend to hunt very large game singly or in small groups, but small fish, small reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and juvenile animals are frequently caught by women and children. The wide range of both small and large species in the cave suggests a pattern of broad-spectrum tropical forest and riverine gathering similar to that of the other eastern Paleo-Indian cultures, rather than the specialized large-game hunting by males envisioned in the Clovis migration theory.

* What Anna Roosevelt does not say here is that if this effect was indeed caused by human hunting pressure, it would mean that a human presence in the area would go back much further than that of the oldest known documented human presence at Monte Alegre. A tantalizing thought! HJW

The stratigraphy of the site is complex.

Here, unit 6 is shown. In the lower part of Level 17c. (marked with a red X) at a depth of ca. 120 cm pigments used in rock paintings were found and dated to an age of around 11,100 before the present by the following methods:

- C14 (Carbon 14, cracked palm fruits in tsratum 17c)

- OSL (optically stimulated luminescence dating, on sediments)

- TL (thermal luminescence dating, on lithics)

The colours of the strata in the graphic to the left are chosen at random and do not reflect the colours of the actual archaeological strata).

.

Excavation in progress at the Pedra Pintada cave under Anna Roosevelt.

Ann Roosevelt also wrote on the tools found at the cave:

Among the pressure-flaked stone tools in the cave, there were large and small, bifacial projectile points sometimes with stems and wings that could have functioned as harpoon and spear points, and heavy scrapers and gravers that could have been used for wood-working. The abundant pigment in the Paleo-Indian levels of the cave is of the same composition as that of the cave paintings, documenting aesthetic-ceremonial activity as well as subsistence foraging. Among the designs are human handprints of adults and children.

A stemmed triangular projectile point made from rock crystal astill in situ on the cave floor. It broke during manufacture and for this reason may have been abandoned in the cave and never used.

The oldest dates at the site are based on more than fifty C14 dates which are corroborated by a number of dates gained from lithic material by thermoluminescence. Dates of the deepest levels at the Pedra Pintada site go back to between 11,200 and 9,800 years before the present. Adjusted with latest calibrations for C14 dates, earliest known human activity in the area could date back to as much as 13,000 years ago.

Although this is rather outside our time frame, it should still be mentioned here that the oldest pottery found at the Pedra Pintada site goes back to 7,500 years, making the earliest known pottery in the Americas. This remarkable pottery culture is best known from the site of Taperinha near Santarem - which happens to be only around 100 km WSW of Monte Alegre. Civilization along the Amazon river clearly did not stand still beween 13,000 and 7,500 years ago!

As the name of the cave makes clear, Pedra Pintada is best known for its rock paintings which - unlike the stone tools that had to be excavated first - were immedately visible to even the most casual or desinterested visitors. As usual with rock paintings, their age is difficult to establish and their meaning can only be guessed at. However, as far as dating is concerned, pigment material identical to that used in the paintings was found in the deepest (Paleo-Indian) levels of the cave. This means that the paintings are indeed very old and may perhaps date as far back as 23,000 years ago.

A "positive" handprint of an adult paleoindian. Photographer unknown.

There are no other prehistoric human traces (not even footprints, human remains or rock art) that can have such an immediate emotional impact on a modern observer. The hands are are not dry bones, dead tools or hard-to-understand paintings, they are primitive "photographs" of once living individuals, deliberately leaving a trace of an important part of their human form.

What the handprints meant to those who made them we do not know. There are such prints all over the world and some in Europe have been dated to before well before 30,000 years ago. Leaving one's handprint appears to have been a general and very early human urge. The ancient handprints are not really far removed from the urge of modern city sprayers who signal little more with their tags than the all-important message "I am alive and I've been here".

Positive handprints (as the one shown here) were made with a hand covered with colour and then slapped on the rockface.

For "negative" handprints, the hand was held on the rockface and the liquid colour was blown from the mouth (probably through a straw) over the hand, leaving a negative image.

More typical of the rock art at the Gruta de Pedra Pintada than the hand print above is this painting.
Photo Thiago do Carmo Jr.

Detail from the rock art shown immediately above.
Photo: Thiago do Carmo Jr.

Serra da Lua

Rock art is not just found in the caves of the area but also in the open air, protected from wind and rain just by overhanging rocks. This painting is in the Serra da Lua, Monte Alegre area.

Age and interpretation (as so often with rock art) must remain largely speculative.

All photographs from the Serra a Lua reproduced here are taken by Thiago do Carmo Jr.