(which held power from 1937 to 1945). Democracy meant the introduction of broader concerns with intellectual discourse and the spread of the university and other learning institutions throughout the country. Furthermore, industrialization, especially in south Brazil, made relatively large funds available for cultural activities.

It was in this context that academic or scholarly archaeology was created by the leading Brazilian humanist Paulo Duarte. Thanks to his friendship with Paul Rivet, director of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, and complementing his own struggle for human rights in Brazil, Duarte created the Prehistory Commission at USP in 1952. An outstanding Brazilian intellectual, he was able to change long-standing features of Brazilian archaeology—its tendency to be parochial, racist, and out of touch, in the tradition of Ihering and others. Duarte was not a museum director pretending to be a scholar, as was the case of directors before and after him. Rather, he was an intellectual and human rights activist who struggled to introduce ethical principles into the very act of creating archaeology as an academic discipline. Duarte also worked politically to craft legislation to protect Brazilian heritage, and thanks to his efforts, the Brazilian Parliament enacted a federal bill (approved as Bill 3924 in 1961) protecting prehistoric assets (Duarte 1958). He studied shellmounds (1952, 1955, 1968, 1969) and encouraged French archaeologists Joseph Emperaire and Annette Laming-Emperaire (1975).

The Military Period and the Constitution of an Archaeological Establishment (1964–1985)

On April 1, 1964, there was a military coup in Brazil, and the armed forces held power until March 15, 1985. Twenty years of authoritarian rule meant that all kinds of human rights abuses were committed. From 1964 until 1968 political repression involved the suppression of formal liberties. After 1968 the military introduced more violent practices, such as expulsion, detention without trial, torture, and murder. Within academia, suppression meant censorship first and expulsion later. The very slow process of relaxing this repression began in the late 1970s and continued until 1985.

In archaeological terms, the main contributors to the discipline during this period were two Americans, Clifford Evans and Betty Meggers (1947, 1954). Although they had excavated at the mouth of the Amazon River as early as 1949 and had produced papers before 1964, it was only after the military coup of April 1964 that Evans and Meggers were able to set up a network that would result in the development of an archaeological establishment.

Duarte’s scholarly archaeology project was mildly opposed by people in power at first, so between 1964 to 1969 he was deprived of funding (the most subtle but effective weapon). Cuts in university budgets in general affected, first and foremost, the human and social sciences, and in the case of archaeology budgetary restrictions were a very powerful way of hindering development. This passive strategy changed as the military begun to use force to rule the country and subdue intellectual opposition in general. The new and violent approach of the authorities was evidenced by the official support of death squads in the late 1960s, introducing Brazilians to the disgusting concept of “missing people” (i.e., people who were arrested and executed secretly because of their political beliefs). Intellectual life underwent radical changes. In the words of Octávio Ianni (1978):

For those who controlled state power from the 1964 coup, there was and there is, in 1978, a need to control, to marginalize, to curb or to suppress dissident voices. The cultural policy in Brazil in the period 1964–1978 divides intellectuals in three categories. There is an encouraged or protected intellectual production; it is the official one. For people in power, this is the only sound production. Then, there is the tolerated overlooked production. Finally, there is the forbidden, censored one.

The archaeological establishment created by the military followed the official line, using Ianni’s terms, and Brazilian archaeology was once again in the hands of museum directors and other bureaucratic officials. Perhaps the best (or worst) example involved Paulo Duarte.