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Some of the main obstacles to the conquest and colonization of America by European powers were the scarce knowledge of the territory and the hostility of indigenous ethnic groups to its presence. Over the years, remarkable characters played the role of explorers and applying empirical methods began the survey of the territory, using the data collected and with the methods available on that time the first maps were delineated. Nearly two centuries passed and maps of South America with the Amazon River and its hydrographic basin as one of the centrals elements began to be produced by religious and scientific personalities. The purposes were totally different, but the expected result was a reliable representation of the area. Through the use of geographic information system programs and specialized software in map comparison, a temporal and comparative analysis of five old maps of the region published in the eighteenth century was carried out, with which in a graphical way the reader can visualize the updates of the mapped geographic elements and the accuracy of the work. Likewise, the selected area was digitalized and the basic cartography of each map with its respective database was created. In order to visualize the information generated through a virtual environment, a Story Map Journal in ArcGIS Online was created, it includes a summary about the life of each author, a description and the bibliographic reference of the map made, and the map compared to current data.

Abstract High-resolution seismic surveys have been successfully applied in the study of active sedimentary environments in shallow submerged settings, particularly improving the interpretation of sedimentary facies and architectural elements that characterize fluvial rock records. Nevertheless, specific data processing workflows to emphasize sedimentary structures have not been proposed or tested, so that interpretation currently relies on the subjective opinion of individual interpreters, which might lead to biased conclusions. Aiming at the construction of a less biased data processing workflow, we developed a software that analyzes seismic data and performs standardized interpretation by linking individual seismic traces to generate interpreted reflector lines. A dataset acquired with boomer continuous seismic profiler in the sedimentary bed of the Amazonas river in Brazil was processed with a typical sequence of filter and gain (using Seismic UNIX software), as well as a routine of trace interpolation written in GNU Octave. The application of the Standardized Interpreter at different stages of processing enabled the comparison of the resulting interpretation scenarios in terms of the representation of geometries related to internal sedimentary structures, thus leading to the proposition of a workflow adapted to the specific needs of sedimentary structure interpretation from seismic data.

An ethnobotanical study was carried out for this study aimed at understanding the medicinal importance of malagueta / chili pepper (C. frutescens L.) in the daily life of the people of Cabeça D'Onça, an area in the Amazon River floodplain. The community of approximately 330 residents is situated in the municipality of Santarém, Pará State. In total, 116 people from 70 households were interviewed for this work. Information regarding the medicinal uses of these peppers was collected in semi-structured interviews and compiled in detail. In the second phase of the study, structured interviews were carried out in 40 households with 80 people (40 couples) to determine the most commonly-known uses of the peppers in the study area. Over 50% of those interviewed cited the use of the malagueta in curing certain illnesses reputed to be caused by contact with water from the Amazon River, including 'pano-branco', and 'impinge' (both diseases of the skin treated with the leaves) and rheumatism (treated with the fruit). A comparison of the data obtained in this study with published literature reveals strong indigenous influence in their medicinal use.

The text presents an introduction to the life and works of Giovanni Angelo Brunelli (1722-1804), a Bolognese astronomer that participated in the first Boundaries Demarcation Committee (1753 to 1761) between Portugal and Spain's South American possessions, serving the Portuguese Crown. The three works of Brunelli about the Brazilian Amazonia are published, whose themes are the 'pororoca' (1767), the manioc (1767), and the Amazon River (1791). Two others documents related to the demarcation committee are also published: Brunelli's letter complaining about the coordination of cartographic works (1752) and the draft of the astronomer's travel diary to the Negro River (1754). All of these documents were translated to Portuguese, for the first time, from the Latin and Italian.

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