Game of scales in Landscape Archeology: regressive cartographies from Piauí to the city of Teresina, between toponyms and platbands

• Grant number: 22/16852-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: June 01, 2023
• End date: January 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning - Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism
• Principal Investigator: Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira Bueno
• Grantee: Wilmar Moura de Souza Junior
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 21/06538-9 - Baroque-açu: Portuguese America in the art geography of the global South, AP.JP2
• Associated scholarship(s): 23/18288-2 - Game of scales in Landscape Archeology: regressive cartographies from Piauí to the city of Teresina, between toponyms and platbands (1761-1938), BE.EP.MS

Abstract

Focusing on the Captaincy of Piauí - later Province of the same name - this research project seeks to respond to the motivations that led to the change of the capital from Oeiras to Teresina, focusing on economic dynamics and political disputes, amid the logic of circulation in the landscape . Supported by the methodological instruments of Landscape Archeology, a line of research coordinated by Prof. Dr. ª Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira Bueno, a game of interdependent scales will be chosen (macro territorial, regional and intra-urban), seeking to empirically demonstrate the strategic role of Piauí between the Sertões do Norte, Maranhão and the Amazon, as well as the changes in the urbanization policy from the colony to the Empire and the motivations that led to the displacement of the capital. From the landscape of this frontier macrozone - in the metaphorical sense of cultural encounter zone - to the intra-urban space, the main issue will be to analyze the cultural landscape of the central area of Teresina in a long-term historical perspective, encompassing the process of conception and implantation of the city, from the choice of the strategic geographic situation for the new political designs, to the election of the most favorable site, to the urban project of regular layout to the avatars and metamorphoses in face of the reality and geographic and human pre-existences. Unfolding in the present, the research culminates in the analysis of the remaining cultural heritage: hybrid cultural heritage typical of a frontier zone with an indigenous majority, approaching the questions proposed by the Project JP2 Barroco Açú, led by Prof. Dr. Renata Maria de Almeida Martins, showing that it is an urban plan and an "eclectic" urban landscape (in the full sense of the term, because it is hybrid) and in need of preservation in its richness and diversity, mainly because it is the target of a predatory process of discards and changes in uses that are insensitive to previous layers of historicity.