Análise Palinológica em Material Cerâmica do Sítio Arqueológico Jambuaçu (PA-BA-85) na Área de Impacto do Mineroduto Paragominas, Barcarena, Pará

Abstract

The use of vegetable natural resources in prehistoric Amazonia shows practices of vegetation management by ancient human populations, rescued by palynological studies in archaeological sites, since pollen has a formidable resistance to weathering processes and agents, which makes it an important bioindicator of changes in the structure and species diversity of vegetation formations in the face of long-term human occupations. The present work is a contribution to the archaeopalynological studies of the Bauxita/Paragominas Preventive Archeology Project, aiming at identifying and quantifying the pollen types present in ceramics (pipes and faience) from the Jambuaçu site (PA-BA-85), municipality of Moju, Pará, whose TPA soils are sandy. The palynological analysis, carried out at the Laboratory of Paleopalinology and Paleoecology/CCTE/MPEG, was based on the Pollen Wash technique (REINHARD, 1996) for extracting material adhered to the ceramics, followed by conventional palynological methods for treating the samples (YBERT et al., 1992). Slides (3-5) were made for identification and counting of pollen types under a MOTIC light microscope. The results show that Kochia scoparia (a pollen marker) was well represented numerically in the samples, indicating that losses of plant material were minimal in the laboratory. The abundance and diversity of angiosperm pollen types were null in the samples, although botanical inventories revealed the presence of 285 plant species, among these 84 useful plants. Other plant micro-organisms, such as epidermis, fungal spores, and pteridophytes were also observed, but were not very abundant. These data show that the plants used in the daily life of the prehistoric populations of Moju may have been totally destroyed, in view of the predominance of sand in the TPA soils, which facilitates their destruction by the weathering action. Another interpretation is the ease of leaching of both pollen and plant micro-organisms, once the high porosity of the TPA soils was observed during field collection.