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This article examines the role of amazon women during the first centuries of European exploration in lowland South America by analyzing the accounts produced by conquistadors, missionaries, and explorers from the sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries. The accounts are analyzed in the light of more recent ethnographical, archaeological, and ethnohistorical studies that reveal in these sources evidence supporting the existence of a native discourse on amazon-like women. It is suggested that Amerindians and Europeans entered into a “dialogue” through a discourse on amazon women. From the Amerindian point of view, this discourse involved ideas about the regeneration of society achieved through exchange, a model of creation that became especially relevant when confronting the European invasion. By relating the accounts to this wider context, the analysis provides a more thorough understanding of the situation of contact and the accounts themselves.

The Amerindian myths of Amazon-like women, widespread in lowland South America, refer to the primordial exchange of particular ritual objects between men and women: ciba, greenstones, flutes, axes. This primordial exchange represents the socially creative moment that led to the establishment of society and provides a general model for social relationships. The ritual exchange or circulation of these objects in other spheres involving male-male relationships turns ordinary exchanges into socially creative exchanges by ritually re-creating the exchange described in the myths. The myths shift the focus from male-male relationships to female-male relationships as the basis of society and provide a commentary on the significance of exchange and social relationships in lowland South America.Early European travellers in South America reported on their encounters with warrior women and on the stories they heard about women who lived by themselves away from men, whom they swiftly identified as Amazons. Faced with the elusive existence of these women, later explorers of the region dismissed these stories as mere fantasies or borrowed tales (Steverlynck 2005). But centuries later the stories still persisted, now collected by ethnographers and anthropologists, revealing that they were clearly not the result of fervid imaginations but philosophical musings on the very nature of society and its contradictions, a metaphorical commentary on the world. 1 In this article I explore the significance of these stories and argue that the Amerindian myths of Amazon-like women refer to a general model of human social relationships based on the reproductive exchange between men and women. 2 The myths relate that the women, who sometimes lived by themselves away from the men, possessed some cultural object essential for the establishment and continuity of society: ciba stones and guanin ornaments among the Taino (Pané

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