This work presents and discusses some characteristics of the deep indigenous history of Monte Castelo, a southwestern Amazonian shellmound site, in the light of recent research on that site and the archaeology of shellmounds throughout the region. The data obtained at Monte Castelo confirm that the oldest and most persistent ceramic assemblages in the Americas are located in shellmounds, in contexts where the construction of the landscapes has lasted for millennia, marking periods of intensification in the human occupation of the Amazon Basin. Material culture, stratigraphy and chronology are presented in order to characterize the fundamental traits relating to the origin and development of ceramic technology and landscape management in the lowlands of South America. Human intervention in the landscape has long propitiated the reoccupation of many of the earliest known archaeological sites. Parallel to this, several paleoenvironmental markers in the southern Amazon have evidenced variations in the climate that accompany human occupations since, at least, the Early Holocene. In the Guaporé river basin, the chronology of the sites seems to accompany trends of increased water availability and forest expansion, in a period marked by the emergence of more numerous communities and complex artifacts throughout the Middle Holocene. There, the feedback between human interventions and climate change has created a privileged place for settlements, whose striking relative continuity has given rise to some of the most important cultural and landscape changes that have spread widely throughout the Amazon and beyond for thousands of years. Seeking to bring the notion of meaningful places to the archaeology of the Amazonian shellmounds, this work proposes a way to understand them through an inclusive notion of ancestry that may be useful for contemporary indigenous peoples to recover their traditional territories.

As relações entre a variabilidade e a variação dos conjuntos líticos de dois abrigossob-rocha do carste de Lagoa Santa-MG são analisadas em relação às estratégias de sobrevivência empregadas pelos grupos caçadores-coletores locais para lidar com as mudanças na disponibilidade de recursos no decorrer do Holoceno Inicial e Médio. Os processos de longa duração que atuaram na formação do registro arqueológico da Lapa do Santo e da Lapa das Boleiras são investigados através do estudo das continuidades e mudanças nas estratégias de procura, confecção, utilização e descarte dos materiais líticos. Palavras-chave: análise lítica, grupos forrageiros, processos de longa duração, estratégias de sobrevivência, variabilidade ambiental.