Archéologie de l’art rupestre au Mato Grosso (Brésil) : la Chapada dos Guimarães

Abstract

As part of the research program “Archaeology of rock art in Mato Grosso: the Chapada dos Guimarães National Park (Cuiabá, Brazil)” placed under the coordination of Patrick Paillet and Veronica Wesolowski, an integrated and interdisciplinary approach to the territory still largely unpublished rock art of the Chapada dos Guimarães, has been undertaken since 2020 by combining strictly archaeological research (surveys, excavations and prospecting-inventories), rock art studies (analysis and graphic, photographic and photogrammetric recording of representations) and geological analyzes and, to define and characterize the structure of its ornamented landscapes. Our program is an extension of other projects carried out from 1983 to 2013 under the direction of Agueda Vilhena-Vialou, Denis Vialou and Levy Figuti in the region of the Cidade de Pedra near Rondonópolis and at Santa Elina in the Serra das Araras (Jangada). The region of the Chapada dos Guimarães National Park (PNCG) was the subject of exploration and partial studies between 2017 and 2019 under the direction of Caroline Bachelet within the framework of the program “Prehistory and Paleoenvironments in the Pantanal region (Mato Grosso, Brazil)”. The pursuit of archaeological research in the PNCG contributes to better defining the chronology and the dynamics of occupations at local and regional scales, to characterizing chrono-culturally the settlements and their variability in the region, extending from the Rio Vermelho in the south to the Rio Cuiabá in the north, and to understand the processes of settlement and/or mobility of past populations along the firm lands and especially the hydrographic systems that border the floodplains of the Pantanal and which constitute the main routes of population movement.