The Indians in the cartography of Lusitanian America

Abstract

Indigenous representations in the cartography of the colonial conquest of Lusitanian America and the Amazon were used to reinvent and locate Indigenous peoples. Often these representations were pictorial, with strong presence of figurative elements and ornaments, particularly seen in the maps produced between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. However, in the Pombaline period (1750 - 1777) there were changes in cartographic representations - aesthetic values related to simplicity and symmetry in the composition of the maps began to stand out in place of ornamentation. Indigenous people are not featured very frequently in the cartographic production of the time, except when represented within the territory administratively defined by Pombaline reforms such as villages, parishes, settlements, farms, mills and plantations. The new Pombaline order intensified the processes of de-territorialization and re-territorialization of Indigenous societies in the Amazon, which came to relate to the Portuguese (and Spanish) colonial conquests in a different way. In this sense, the objective of this article is to discuss indigenous representations within the scope of space representation (designed space) of colonial Amazonia, through the investigation of colonial maps within the theoretical-methodological perspective of historical cartography.

Keywords
Indigenous representations; Historical cartography; Colonial Amazonia