Material culture and social practices on the Caminho do Viamão: Toponymic landscapes, archaeology of everyday experience of mule drive, muleteers' profiles and their baggage (18th and 19th centuries)

Abstract

Our article shows the methods used to interpret landscape and material culture, with focus on the Carta Geographica de Projeção Espherica da Nova Lusitânia ou América Portugueza e Estado do Brazil (1797), intersected with practice, military engineers, naturalists and traveling painters' reports and demographic contemporary sources. Its archaeological-philological profile follows the study of the toponymia and shows uncovering layers from different periods, depicting and contextualizing anthropic drivers and reasons for settlement or mobility, mule drive traffic along the route and rivers with both opportunities and difficulties for communication, thus pursuing vestiges for a phenomenology of lifeways on the macroregional level. The Caminho do Viamão is a pretext to practice what we call landscape archeology to locate interimperial territorialities to be analyzed from the point of view of their everyday dynamic while focusing material culture and its interfaces with geographic and phytophysiognomic aspects. Our article analyzes the natural and anthropic pluralism of this cultural landscape using primary sources from the 18th and early 19th centuries to describe the everyday experience of mule drive and the muleteers' baggage.