the empiricism imposed by the North Americans Evans and Meggers. Their environmental determinism and their emphasis on empirical fieldwork, however, did not produce a generation of ecological determinists. As the archaeological establishment was being set up in the late 1960s and 1970s under military rule, Brazilian archaeologists who were trained to become empiricists and ecological determinists were not interested in fulfilling their role as defenders of a specific scientific approach. Because there were no checks on their activities and power, we cannot say that, as a group, the Brazilian archaeologists educated by Meggers were recognized as respected empiricists and determinists outside the country and by international standards. Unarticulated fieldwork, the absence of corpora, and poor classification were accompanied by a poor development of ecological models.

The restoration of civilian rule in 1985 was bound to introduce radical changes to this picture. Once again, European influences were at the root of a new upsurge of interest in the application of historical and social theories to archaeology and material culture studies. The first papers on archaeological theory written by Brazilians were produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Funari 1989; Kern 1991a, 1991b). Today, a younger generation of students are regularly reading such authors as lewis r. binford, Courbin, j. j. f. deetz, Gardin, Hodder, Shanks, Tilley, and B. Trigger. Although the archaeological establishment continues along its conservative, antitheoretical track, young scholars are increasingly venturing into theoretical readings and previously unexplored research areas. A case in point is the master’s thesis by the young archaeologist Leila Maria Serafim Pacheco (1992, 5), “directly under the influence of the English-language archaeological theory produced in the 1980s,” as she puts it. English-language titles represent 58 percent of all quoted works (36 of 62), and there is no doubt that the so-called postprocessual approaches dominating British and North American archaeologies are becoming increasingly popular in Brazil. The work of Eduardo Góes Neves, a young archaeologist at the Ethnological and Archaeological Museum, is a good example of this theoretical trend among Brazilian prehistory scholars. Nonetheless, there is still a preference for processual (or at least noncritical) approaches and for authors such as Carl Moberg, James Deetz (mostly his prehistory works), and Lewis Binford (E. Neves 1989). There is a new focus on reading the work of social scientists and historians. Arno Alvarez Kern and Adriana Schmid Dias recently published an inspiring paper entitled “Remarks on the relationship between archaeology and history of ancient societies,” which dealt with four main theoretical subjects: material culture; material culture and archaeology; artifacts and history; and archaeology and the knowledge of ancient societies. In this paper there was an eclectic use of different authors and approaches, as the authors put together Annales School historians (such as Fernand Braudel and Marc Bloch), neopositivist historians (such as Paul Veyne), classical and traditional archaeologists (such as Renée Ginouves and mortimer wheeler), and, among others, Jean-Marie Pesez, Alexandr Mongait, and Richard Bucaille. In this case, there was no reference to postprocessual archaeology, and although the explicit goal of the article was to emphasize the necessary links between archaeology and history, the authors concluded that the “New Archaeology” (processual archaeology), despite unspecified attacks or drawbacks, was a breath of fresh air.

Another recent and interesting theoretical trend in Brazil is the study of the epistemology of archaeological reasoning. Haiganuch Sarian (1989) has paid attention to the archaeological interpretation of pottery in terms of both practical and methodological analyses. Although a descriptive approach to artifacts still prevails in Brazilian archaeology, pottery studies are increasingly influenced by analytical scholars. Norberto Luiz Guarinello (1989), for example, represents a young generation of scholars who (under the influence of theoreticians Michael Rowlands and Andrea Carandini, among others) are interested in discussing such questions as the relationship between written documents and material culture and how archaeology can be used to study general subjects like imperialism and exploitation. It is important to emphasize