Sous les temps de l'équateur

In this history of Brazil before colonisation, Brazilian archaeologist Eduardo Góes Neves challenges the dominant image of the Amazon, too often imagined as a pristine, cultureless wilderness on the southern edge of South America.

To do so, he traces the history of human occupation of the Amazon basin, which began more than 11,000 years ago, up to the first European conquests. Adopting a historical and cultural approach, Neves–drawing on the work of his many collaborators–presents an Amazon at the heart of the continent's development, a space where diverse populations gathered, settled and traded with distant peoples, including groups from the high plateaus of the Andes.

Drawing on more than thirty years of research, the author traces, in chronological order, the lives of the men and women who inhabited the Amazon in a variety of ways and who were at the origin of numerous technical and cultural innovations.

By rethinking the history of the Amazon basin, Eduardo Góes Neves invites readers to reconsider these ancient societies, which deliberately chose not to organise themselves as a state, thus offering a less compartmentalised view of human trajectories.

Eduardo Góes Neves is a Brazilian archaeologist and one of the leading experts on the Amazon. He is a professor at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, University of São Paulo, and coordinates the Laboratory of Tropical Archaeology. With over thirty years of field research in the Amazon, he has published more than 120 articles on the subject and supervised over 60 research projects.