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This article defines the spatial configuration of the large pre-colonial site in the present-day city of Santarém on the lower Amazon, Brazil, demonstrating a settlement pattern consisting of two villages separated by a seasonal lake. The sites Aldeia (121 ha) and Porto (89 ha) form part of the largest archaeological complex found today in any urban area of Amazonia. The article describes the research methods employed, including augering, geophysical prospecting, and stratigraphic excavation, and presents the contexts of cultural occupation, as well as the chronology, which confirms the contemporaneity of these sites between a.d. 1200 and 1600. Both sites are habitational, while the Aldeia site appears to have been a ceremonial center with features for depositing shamanic artifacts. The article argues that although evidence has been found for a hierarchy of sites within the region, this does not imply political centralization but rather situates the Aldeia site as a place of ritual convergence, thus pointing to other ways of thinking about social complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have shown that pre-Columbian societies in the Amazon undertook significant landscape modifications, including earthworks. Our fieldwork has revealed that pre-Columbian settlements in the Santarém Region, Lower Amazon, were not limited to the vicinities of permanent water courses, as formerly often assumed. Instead, numerous archaeological sites, dating from ca. a.d. 1300 up to the time of European colonization in the seventeenth century, have been found in an upland area known as the Belterra Plateau, south of the present-day city of Santarém. These upland sites have been found to be associated with particular features in the landscape: cavities or depressions, known locally as “Poços de Água”. LiDAR data shows that a pattern of non-randomly distributed depressions extends far into the densely forested Tapajós National Forest (Flona-Tapajós), allowing us to suggest that the expansion of inland settlement extended considerably farther to the south than what has previously been established through conventional archaeological fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]