Lucas Bond Reis

LUCAS BOND REIS, then a graduate student at University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizon, was awarded a grant in October 2022 to aid research on “People, Plants, and Land in Long-term Bundled Interactions: Composing Southern Je Complexities in the Upper Itajai Valley (Santa Catarina State, Brazil),” supervised by Dr María Nieves Zedeño. The Laklãnõ-Xokleng ontology, driven by hunting practices and grounded in an applied knowledge epistemology, informs their place-making practices and narratives across the southern Brazilian Plateau since time immemorial. By combining 28 new radiocarbon dates produced through this study with an additional 30 from existing literature, along with oral history and ethnohistorical sources, we unravel information into the millennia-long process of persistent, continuous dwelling in the Upper Itajaí Valley by the Laklãnõ-Xokleng communities and their ancestors over the past 1,700 years. This is evidenced through archaeological findings, including lithic, ceramic, rock shelters, and earthwork sites (such as pit houses and mounds). The place-making process also involves diversifying technological strategies for producing, utilizing, and discarding artifacts (including lithics, ceramics, basketry, and metal) across a well-known landscape, where human and non-human relationships are intertwined in everyday life. This research deepens our understanding of place-making practices and the complexities created by the Laklãnõ-Xokleng and their ancestors through movement (Machado 2016). It also suggests a flow of information between them and other Native communities who resided in areas later chosen to construct pit houses, as indicated by the earliest dates at the Tobias Wagner site (5587-5475 cal. BP; 2850-1366 cal. BP).