colonial art (Oliveira 1989), on blacks as represented in paintings (Lima 1988), and on statues and ideology (Doberstein 1992). Furthermore, during the dictatorship years (1964 to 1985), when the archaeological establishment was either allied with the military or silent, the struggle for human rights was carried on by the Brazilian Committee for Art History and its leader, Paulo Ferreira Santos (Vasconcelos 1989, 174–183). It is amazing that at the same time, professional archaeologists were working “in collaboration with the Brazilian Army,” in the words of Paulo Zanettini and Miriam Cazzetta (1993, 6), as in the case of the fieldwork at the colonial military site near Recife (M. Albuquerque 1969). Recent examples of architectural and art historical contributions to the study of historical material culture appear in papers by W. Pfeiffer (1992) on religious architecture and by Tirapoli (1992) on seventeenth-century art at Minas Gerais, both of which were published in Les dossiers de l’archéologie. The protection of the earliest Jewish synagogue in the Americas, established in 1641 at Recife (in the northeast), has been led by a journalist, Leonardo Dantas Silva (1993). And last but not least, the study of the mass graves of the missing people has been carried out by the physician Eric Stover for the Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch (Stover 1991). For both scientific and political reasons, then, we cannot underestimate the importance of the contributions of architects, art historians, and other scholars to the inception and development of historical material culture studies.

The presence of the second group of practitioners—nonacademic field-workers—is the direct result of the development of private archaeological entrepreneurs since the late 1960s. State corporations and some large private companies blossomed during the heyday of the Brazilian “economic miracle” and were able to fund private fieldwork to carry out specific archaeological tasks. Nonacademic field-workers also came to the fore when crews working on large developments (such as huge dams, urban refashioning, or road construction) had to rescue archaeological material before beginning their projects. However, most of this fieldwork is and will remain unpublished. Funds were not used to study the material, and in general, there was no estimating of and funding for the storage of collected artifacts. Some professional archaeologists worked under these conditions, mainly because of the poor pay they received in museums and heritage offices, but they were unable to shun the constraints of these rescue activities. Another negative side effect of the situation was that field-workers were chosen not for their merits but because of personal and/or familial ties with corporate managers. With field-workers being paid as friends, receiving in two months more than a Ph.D. scholar receives in two years of scientific work in any academic post, it is easy to understand the stress that this situation causes, exacerbating differences between scholars and market-oriented field-workers.

Professional archaeologists, working in academic institutions such as universities, museums, and heritage institutions, form the third group of people dealing with historical material culture. Some professional archaeologists have been excavating historical sites using a descriptive approach. But many field seasons produce no written reports, and others result only in unpublished descriptive accounts. The more active field-workers are Marcos Albuquerque (1971, 1980, 1991) in the northeast, Margarida Davina Andreatta (1981–1982, 1986) in São Paulo, Maria da Conceição Beltrão (Neme, Beltrão, and Niemeyer 1992) at Bahia and Rio de Janeiro, and Ulysses Pernambucano de Mello (1975, 1976, 1983) in the northeast. Young graduate students are also active, among them Paulo Tadeu de Souza Albuquerque (1991) at Vila Flor (in the northeast), Miriam Cazzetta (1991), and Paulo Zanettini (1986, 1990). Archaeologists dealing with heritage management have also been publishing papers on urban archaeology (Vogel and Mello 1984) and on historical archaeology and heritage (Vianna 1992). The first introductory handbook on historical archaeology was written by Charles E. Orser Jr. and translated by Pedro Paulo A. Funari in 1992. This is a landmark, giving practicing students access to an up-to-date manual on the field (Orser 1992b).