William Barnard’s “notes” and the Archaeology of Marajó

Abstract

The Marajó Archipelago, located at the mouth of the Amazon River, has become one of the most notable fields for studying archeology in the Amazon region. The first scientific investigations and earliest published studies about the mounds in this area emerged in the nineteenth century, and from that time Marajó became the focus of numerous expeditions led by Brazilian and foreign scientists interested in ceramic remains that bore witness to Brazilian “prehistory”. While names such as Domingos Soares Ferreira Penna, Ladislau Netto, Charles Hartt, Helen Palmatary, Betty Meggers, and Clifford Evans appear frequently in works that attempt to outline the history of archaeological research in the region, other researchers remain relatively unknown and poorly studied, even though their work was fundamentally important to the field. This article introduces one such person, William Stebbins Barnard, one of the first foreigners who undertook an expedition to visit a mound in Marajó, and also provides a transcription and translation of part of his field notes, an unpublished document that today is preserved in the Carl A. Kroch Library at Cornell University in the United States and considered one of the first prospective archaeological studies of Marajó on the international level.

Keywords
Marajó; Archaeology; William Stebbins Barnard