Cultural Taxonomies in Eastern South America: Historical Review and Perspectives

In this article, we will provide a brief history of the appropriation and development of the concepts of “culture,” “tradition,” “technocomplex,” among others, in Eastern South America (Brazil), and present its state of the art. We will discuss some of the convergences and divergences in the nature of the archaeological record of South America, North America, and Europe, as well as their possible theoretical implications, since classification templates or classificatory schemes are strongly dependent on the phenomena they address, whether we acknowledge that or not. Finally, we aim to present some results and the main lines of future action in our current work on this topic.