O Alto Jacuí na pré-história : subsídios para uma arqueologia das fronteiras

Abstract

Even with the increase in archaeological research observed in Rio Grande do Sul in recent years, the watershed of the Alto Jacuí is among the regions we have little information about the processes of human settlement occurred along prehistory. The aim of this research is to systematize archaeological, historical and ethnohistorical data, giving an overview of prehistoric colonization of this region. The available data allow us to assign the beginning of occupation to the groups of hunters and gatherers who settled these landscapes around the beginning of the Holocene period. New population, composed of farmers and potters groups, would have come to the region about two thousand years ago, changing the dynamics of settlement in Jacuí valley and araucaria forests in the highlands. Its geographical localizationin the north central portion of the State characterizes the region as a zone of convergence and transition of several characteristics of the physical and biotic environment. The analytical and interpretative processing of information allows us to ascribe a boundary character to theAlto Jacuí region. The cultural interactions between prehistoric human societies is reflected, among other instances, in their material culture. The contextual archaeology perspective allows us to integrate the semiotics considering the symbolic content of material culture in the cultural context, in which the evidence of contact is also interpreted as a result of their social function as an identity element constructed and articulated in a boundary zone