Gerson Levi-Mendes, ethnoarchaeologist and second-year graduate student at Vanderbilt University will be presenting on October 12th a paper on Ninam Ethnhistory based on colonial files that he has been working in the last 2 years. However, the main files arrived to him this year thought Professor Istvan Jancso (President of the Institute of Brazilian Studies, University of Sao Paulo) and Projeto Resgate that joined and digitalized thousand of Brazilian colonial documents from the Ultramarine Archive in Lisbon, Portugal. Read his abstract below. The Conference will be at Orono, University of Maine. A first draft was presented to graduate students and faculty in the Department of Anthropology on September 26th. Below the abstract approved to the Conference.
Ninam ethnohistory: A historical synthesis based on Portuguese colonial texts of the Sao Jose do Rio Negro province, Amazon, Brazil
Gerson Levi-Mendes, Vanderbilt University
Based on early colonial records and explorer's journals and documents of the Sao Jose do Rio Negro Province dated between the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries, the first ethnohistorical synthesis of the Ninam Indians in the Colonial era is reconstructed. Being the smallest and one of the most isolated linguistic Yanomami subgroups, the Niman were never previously detected in historical records. External Karib or Nheengatu denominations of Yanomami subgroups had failed to detect earlier contact between Brazilian settlers and the eastern Yanomami, to which the Nimam belong. Based on Ninam oral history, ethnoarchaeological studies and colonial files, it is now possible to identify and reconstruct the first contacts with and references to these people.
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