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After working for thirteen years at the Amazonian Jesuitic missions, the Portuguese Jacinto de Carvalho (1677-1744) sent to the Superior of his order a report on the country and on some of its native tribes' customs. This report, the main ethnographic source of early 18th Century Amazonia, is known only through a coeval Italian translation still unpublished. In this paper, the parts on ethnographic matters have been commented and translated to Portuguese.

Differences in relative abundance and species richness of spiders in artificial forest gaps with different levels of regeneration at Porto Urucu, Amazonas, Brazil, were investigated. Three complementary collecting methodologies were employed, resulting in the capture of 3.786 adult individuals, belonging to 623 species of 39 spider families. The present study accumulates the highest species number among all other published papers on spider inventories in the Neotropical Region, despite that 55% of the entire collection was composed of rare organisms. The most accurate algorithm for the present dataset, ACE, estimated a richness of 924 species. Rarefaction curves for each one of the 33 forest gaps sampled highlighted a group of forest gaps which exhibited significantly lower levels of species richness (40 to 43) and another group that exhibited significantly higher levels of species richness (98 to 100). Despite the non-significant differences in abundance and species richness among forest gaps, suggesting that the recorded species number is a direct function of the sampling intensity realized in each site. This suggests that the effective use of data on abundance and species richness of spiders in the evaluation of the regeneration levels of tropical forests depends on a much higher sampling effort than those which have been realized in structured inventories of these animals in Brazilian Amazonia.

The main focus of this paper is the examination of some of the current trends in Brazilian Amazon that are promoting significant changes in the standards of economic use involving some rain forests products. These new trends are demonstrating, in resume, an extensive modernization of economic activities that affect specifically the structure and dynamics of organized communities in this region. On the other hand, these trends also affect the linkage of these communities with the respective networking in each case. In many cases, the type of region networking is leaded by industrial companies. The research also indicate that the main sources of this new process are the market increase for products extracts in Amazon biodiversity, and beside this, both scale and level of processing. Finally, it approaches another strategic source of modernization, represented by a closer and effective participation of regional scientific research institutions in these new or emerging systems’.

Nearly 38% of all families living in settlements of Brazilian land reform are in the Amazon. One of the problems is that large segments of the settlers do not fit into the target group of land reform and more than 50% of the allotments conceded by land reform already have been commercialized by the settlers – even before receiving the final land title. This paper is based upon field research carried on in the southeast of State of Pará with the intention of analyzing the livelihood strategies of land reform settlers and relationship between these settlers and their habitat (Settlement Project), understood as social space and space of natural resources. The guiding questions of this inquiry are: which are the settlers’ livelihood strategies? Are they sustainable? Which are the reasons of the settlers to leave the hamlet and commercialize their allotments? How is their relationship to the natural and social environment of the settlement? How do public policies interfere? Issues related to public goods and self-governed common-pool resources are very important to these questions. The social organization of the settlers, as well as the institutional guaranties given by the State are therefore the central axis of this article.

The paper deals with the trip of the Swiss botanist Jacques Huber (1867-1914) to the main eastern rubber producing countries between 1911 and 1912. This trip was intended to develop studies on the cultivation of Hevea brasiliensis in that region. Huber was commissioned with the task by the State of Pará governor João Coelho, who wanted to find solutions to the downfall of the regional economy. The economy of Amazonia was primarily based on rubber extractivism and was seriously endangered due the market controlled by England from eastern plantations. Back to Brazil, Huber published a report with information about the society, economy and environment where the rubber trees were cultivated. The report compiles scientific observations and the topics that motivated the regional elites in that context. In addition to the brief analyses of the report, photographs took by Huber in the East of rubber trees plantations, tree tapping and local workers are published.

Illustrated biographical notes about the Swiss botanist Jacques Huber (1867-1914), that worked in the Emilio Goeldi Museum of Pará, in Belém, Brazil, from 1895 to 1914, becoming its Director since 1907. The paper highlights Huber’s scientific works, mainly the studies about the rubber trees; the trips and explorations he made in the Amazon, the Brazilian Northeast, and East; the colleagues and disciples; and the political context of Pará State in the beginning of 20th century.

This paper reports on bird records from the little studied Bragantina region, in the densely populated Northeastern Amazon. This region was a center of human colonization in the last century, resulting in the nearly complete replacement of rainforests by a dynamic, mosaic-like rural landscape pattern. From February 1999 to January 2001, I surveyed birds at three sites: a 25-ha smallholding farm, and around two small lakes, in the municipality of Igarapé-Açu. Bird species were recorded along 36 days during an agricultural experiment. As would be expected, species lists from these sites show reduced bird diversity in comparison to primary forests. They also reveal a preponderance of robust, widespread generalists, such as Crotophaga ani (Linnaeus, 1758), Ramphocelus carbo (Pallas, 1764), and Columbina passerina (Linnaeus, 1758). However, endemic Xipholena lamellipennis (Lafresnaye, 1839), Tachybaptus dominicus (Linnaeus, 1766), and Primolius maracana (Vieillot, 1816) (high count of 34 at one time), were also observed. In all, 110 bird species (representing 95 genera and 40 families) are listed with information about abundance and habitat. More detailed surveys of this region are recommended, which should focus on gallery forests that might serve as refuges for some forest species.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the role of women in the so called caminhada (march) to a land reform project in the State of Pará, Brazil. When a woman decides to join the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) (Landless Workers’ Movement) she may enter into conflict with her social environment. In the light of the changes happening due to her militancy, I want to elucidate the reasons for her involvement, examine female contributions during the settlement process and the changes this process may cause in their lives. The analysis is based upon a fieldwork conducted in a land reform hamlet near the city of Castanhal in northeastern Pará. Three case studies of female militancy are examined. Some of the outcomes of this analysis are that the role of women in this process is prominent because they are its most important support; they are assuming pioneer functions, organizing domestic and public tasks in the settlement and play the role of articulators between the different households. Due to their militancy poor urban and rural women are able to step out of their invisibility, often suffered in Brazilian society, and make an important contribution to the construction of a new life.

Since the 1970s, the ethnoarchaeology was held in the Amazon region with different issues, problems and goals. Regardless of their perspectives, these works have contributed to the views of prehistory of Amazon, expanding the possibilities to analyze the archaeological record. They also contribute to criticism and revision of traditional paradigms that have dominated since for long time the explanations about the ways of life of present and past Amazonians populations. This paper presents a review of ethnoarchaeological research in Amazon emphasizing the importance of ethnoarchaeology to knowledge of prehistory of Amazon as well as to the continuity of archaeological research in Amazon region.

Since the beginning of academic discussions on human occupation in Amazonia there has been a constant disagreement about the continuity of the actual scenario of indigenous populations and their pre-colonial ancestors. From one side or the other, the colonization, its impact among indigenous populations and its impelling effect for the creation and transformation ofnew social actors was – and still is – a key point for the interpretation of this transition between the pre-colonial Amazonian past and the present. In this paper I attempt to approach what these indicators of continuity would be. Through examples from Amazonian archaeology, anthropology and, more specifically, from an ongoing ethnoarchaeological research among riverine communities of Caviana Island, in the Pará state, Brazil, I approach the conceptions and preconceptions embodied in formulations about continuity between Amazonian past and present.

The paper analyzes the evolution of the public policies on forest reserves in Brazil from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s, when the category of National Forest was established as public land for timber exploitation. The text examines the main motivations behind forest reserve policies that aimed to promote and regulate timber production in the country, and its direction to the Amazon region in the geopolitical context of modernization and intensifying regional development. In 1974, the federal government created the Tapajós National Forest, in the State of Pará, with the aim of expanding and controlling wood production according to the requirements of the scientific forestry management, a concept that originated in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth-century and informed the creation of a National Forest system in the United States in the beginning of the twentieth-century. The emergence of a forest reserve system in the Amazon region aimed to increase the participation in the international timber market by providing strong technical and fiscal support. However, despite the fact that the Amazon timber eventually reached the international market, production did not come from any forest reserve, nor followed the principles of the modern scientific forest management.

The present paper aims at the understanding of the temporality of the inhabitants of Apeú Salvador/Viseu, Pará’s village. In order to accomplish this, we apply the concepts of traditional and modern, performing an itinerary that describes the social organization of this population, in order to reach the elements that order their collective and, looking at their statute, capture the meanings and spaces of the collective as well as the individual. Finally, from the results of this itinerary, we conclude that the temporal structure of this village is modern and reveals the psyche produced by one of the infinite sub-conditions of the modernity.

This paper discusses the thought of Ferreira of Castro and his view about the Amazonian region. The purpose of our work is to discuss the establishment of the social thought in the Amazon. The work to be viewed is "A Selva", written by Ferreira de Castro between 1910 and 1920. "A Selva" is not a scientific or academic work, but a romance, in which the author narrates experiences lived in the trails of the traditional rubber taping areas of the Amazon, marked by his own perceptions on sharp observation of the local practices that form complex network of social relationships.

Amazon caboclos have been variously described as peasants, forest extractors, backwoodsmen, and descendants of mixed European, Indian, and African ancestry. In nearly all definitions it is acknowledged that the term is pejorative and seldom used when addressing an equal. Many within the subculture do not use it to refer to themselves, while those who do label themselves as such do so under special circumstances. If one accepts that a political/ethical goal of social science - particularly of anthropology - is to understand cultures on an equal basis and to provide as much integrity to them as we do our own, then why do we insist on using the term? This paper examines this quandary by discussing representation and uses of authority in ethnographic writing.