Development Projects, Violation of Human Rights, and the Silence of Archaeology in Brazil
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Development Projects, Violation of Human Rights, and the Silence of Archaeology in Brazil Loredana Ribeiro 1
Published online: 5 September 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract In the last 40 years archaeology in Brazil has grown in the wake of development projects, covered by the objectivity of techniques and neutrality, and isolated from conflicts and environmental injustices associated with such projects. The arguments on this paper revolve around narratives of rock art from a Brazilian region where people were relocated after their displacement by a large scale development project in the 1970s; they seek to discuss the environmental management model adopted in Brazil and how professional archaeologists act within it. Keywords Brazil . Development . Environmental conflict . Contract archaeology . Dams
Introduction The Sobradinho Hydroelectric Power Plant was built in the 1970s in northeastern Brazil. Its construction induced the compulsory displacement of over 70,000 people from the margins of the São Francisco River. To relocate this population the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform—Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (INCRA)—created the Special Project of Colonization—Projeto Especial de Colonização (PEC)—of Serra do Ramalho, a hilly formation located in a semiarid region hundreds of kilometers south of the displaced population’s original lands and already inhabited by an indigenous group, the Pankaru (Fig. 1). In the second half of the 1970s more than a thousand families were relocated from the dam area to the Serra do Ramalho. As a result, the Pankaru were confined to a planned village and a small dry woodland area (Estrela 2009). Thirty years later, between 2004 and 2005, while studying rock art in the region I became close to some of the people that had been forcibly relocated from Sobradinho to
* Loredana Ribeiro [email protected] 1
Departamento de Antropologia e Arqueologia, Universidade Federal de Pelotas, Pelotas, Brazil
Int J Histor Archaeol (2015) 19:810–821
811 Costa Rica Panamá
Venezuela
Guyana Suriname French Guiana
Colombia Ecuador
Sobradinho Dam
Serra do Ramalho
Bolivia
Riv er
Sobradinho Dam
Brazil
Peru
Chile
Paraguay
Francisco
Argen
São
Uruguay
Data SIO, NOAA,U.S. Navy,NGA, GEBCO Image Landsat
Serra do Ramalho
Fig. 1 Location of Sobradinho Dam and Special Project of Colonization Serra do Ramalho (). Below, panoramic view of Sobradinho Dam ()
the PEC Serra do Ramalho (Ribeiro 2009). Matilde, Valdeci, and Décio were some of people who guided me and my team to the archaeological sites, and with whom I developed a closer relationship. From the conversations we had on a variety of subjects, their childhood and youth memories in Sobradinho and stories of spirits in the rock art sites were prominent. It was while talking about the painted rock shelters and the entities that dwell there that I got to know the histories of those peoples, the Baffected by Sobradinho,^ the most harmed and least benefited by thi
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