Arqueologia, patrimônio e sociedade: diálogos entre ciências e comunidades locais do sertão do Piauí no século XX

Abstract

This thesis addresses the processes and implications of Archaeology as a science produced within academia, understood as a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field, in its relationship with the local communities of the Serra da Capivara National Park region in the hinterlands of Piauí. Our objective is to discuss the entanglement between the knowledge of traditional communities in the Serra da Capivara Territory (TD Serra da Capivara) and Archaeology, aiming to highlight the connections, their transformations, and/or adaptations promoted by this entanglement over time. The ways of life of the populations who lived and still live in the TD Serra da Capivara were shaped by a cultural connection to the land they inhabited. This environment shaped their ways of making, creating, and living, as they harvested from this land the fruits that sustained them. Thus, we understand that the construction of scientific knowledge does not hold a privileged position over the knowledge of traditional communities. Therefore, archaeology can be understood as symmetrical, breaking with the dualism between subjects and objects of knowledge (LATOUR, 2008). To construct this text, we began by surveying the bibliography on Archaeology and traditional communities. We highlighted a considerable number of works that address archaeological research in the Serra da Capivara National Park, as well as other studies related to traditional communities. However, we noted a lack of works that go beyond the narrative of the conflicts surrounding the demarcation of the Serra da Capivara National Park, which are usually based on an institutionalized discourse. Subsequently, we employed oral history as a method to bring into the discussion narratives that, throughout the process of interaction with science in the TD Serra da Capivara, were silenced—not in the sense of being forbidden to speak, but in the construction and popularization of narratives about research in the region and the traditional populations, where any narrative differing from the institutionalized one was/is discredited and/or silenced. This thesis evidences our efforts to construct a narrative that, in its structure, can bring discussions and tools necessary to understand the relationship between the traditional communities of the TD Serra da Capivara and Archaeology, while also raising questions about this relationship.