hegemony, there was cultural shift in the country from the court in Rio de Janeiro to the new Paulista elite. This shift explains the role the Paulista Museum played in the field from the beginning of the twentieth century. To be sure, there were people studying elsewhere, such as the Swiss Emílio Goeldi (1897–1898, 1900), who explored the Amazon basin from his post at the Museu do Pará (now known as the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi), or Alberto Loefgren (1893, 1903), who studied shellmounds from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, as did Ricardo Krone (1902, 1909, 1910, 1914, 1918). However, long-standing archaeological activities were in São Paulo. The German scholar Hermann von Ihering (1895, 1902, 1904, 1907, 1911) became director of the Paulista Museum in 1895 and was in charge until 1916, when he was dismissed for political reasons (Losano 1992, 99). Although Ihering was a racist and even defended the extermination of native Indians in Brazil, and although he opposed the idea that shellmounds were evidence of prehistoric human settlements, he should be considered as the first conservative ideologist of Brazilian archaeology. It is interesting to note that he was, at the same time, out of touch with modern research in Europe and a political reactionary. The conservative establishment born in the 1960s would inherit this outlook.

Teodoro Sampaio (1916, 1918, 1922) was perhaps the best example of this generation of pioneer scholars, none of them professional archaeologists. His general paper entitled “Brazilian Archaeology” (1922) and believed wholeheartedly that rock scratches should be interpreted as hieroglyphic writing.

The Formative Period (1920–1949)

Important changes occurred in Brazil during this period, particularly in terms of political, social, and cultural upheavals. Rebellions, revolutions, and dictatorship went hand in hand with cultural transformation. Modernism and later fascist and communist ideas fostered discussions on democracy in intellectual circles. From that point on intellectuals would address the peoples’ interests, and even as the masses were the subject of intellectual discourse, they were also its ultimate audience. The establishment of the first university in Brazil in the early 1930s, São Paulo State University (USP), was a direct result of this new situation. As a side effect archaeologists began to take the public into account and tried for the first time to carry out taxonomic scientific analysis.

This period thus witnessed two new developments in archaeology: the study of artifact collections and the publication of manuals. Anibal Mattos continued the tradition of earlier periods but produced scholarly manuals, especially on material from the State of Minas Gerais. Mattos’s Brazilian Prehistory Handbook (1938) is still worth reading, particularly his introductory assessment of the disputes between different practitioners. Angyone Costa (1935, 1936, 1984) produced the first overall introductions to Brazilian archaeology and prehistory. Frederico Barata (1944, 1950, 1952) wrote the first introduction to prehistoric art in Brazil. The Argentinean Antônio Serrano (1937, 1938, 1940,1946) studied Brazilian collections of artifacts and thus established a new field in Brazilian archaeology. This whole period before the introduction of archaeology into the Brazilian academic world (that is, prior to the 1950s) is usually dismissed by students of the history of Brazilian archaeology. But the significance of the publication of the first manuals and the inception of collection studies should not be underestimated, considering that archaeology in Brazil continues to lag behind that of other Latin American countries in both these areas. Consequently, this formative period should be reinterpreted as an important landmark. If there is a lack of handbooks and collection studies later on, notably after 1964, the reasons should be sought not in the period from the 1920s to the 1950s but rather in the military clampdown on the academic world in the 1960s and 1970s.

The Inception of University Research (1950–1964)

After World War II Brazil enjoyed its longest democratic period. The participation of Brazilian soldiers in the Allied fight against fascism in Europe (1942–1945) established the basis for the overthrow of the Brazilian dictatorship