The Antiquity of the Prehistoric Settlement of the Central-South Brazilian Coast

Abstract

We discus here the prehistoric settlement of the central-south Brazilian coast, and, more specifically, 1 old radiocarbon date obtained for a costal shellmound, as well as its implications concerning the chronology attributed to the settlement process. The accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) technique was used to determine the 14 C age of charcoal from a shellmound on the southern coast of Rio de Janeiro. The resulting age was 7860 ± 80 BP, an unexpected result that reinforces 2 similar previously obtained dates for the same region. Brazilian archaeologists, however, have questioned those 2 dates, because they would predate by some 2000 yr the antiquity consensually accepted for the settlement of the central-south Brazilian littoral.