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The subsoil of the northeastern hinterland holds many treasures. Among them are emeralds, taken from mines that are up to 150 metres deep.
There are also natural caves, where researchers have found fossils of prehistoric animals and traces of Brazil’s ancient inhabitants.
The underground labyrinths of the sertões stretch for hundreds of kilometres, revealing a surprising wealth of history and nature.
Subsolo do sertão nordestino tem esmeraldas, minas, cavernas e arqueológia
Bahia’s subsoil has the largest number of caves in the country.
They are huge tunnels with sandstone formations and fossils of prehistoric animals. The cave’s inhabitants, the bats, rest on the ceiling, in a place where they are well protected.
At some points, the cave looks like a temple due to its surprising beauty. ‘It has 28 kilometres of topography, but we already know a lot more than that and our generation probably won’t reach the end of this cave, which is very extensive,’ says researcher Rangel Carvalho.
The researchers found fossils of prehistoric animals in the subsoil of the northeastern sertão. ‘Here we have a fossil of a deer. It’s an extinct animal that has been identified. It’s an animal that lived around ten thousand years ago,’ explains the speleologist.
In Sergipe, on the banks of the São Francisco River, a museum houses relics of major archaeological discoveries in the backlands.
The Xingó Museum has panels and backdrops with illustrations of the region’s first inhabitants painting the cave walls and making cave inscriptions.
‘What could be rescued was rescued. There were 36 archaeological sites located. What has been recovered already gives us a meaning, an idea of the importance of this region for the prehistoric context,’ says Railda Nascimento Silva, the museum’s coordinator.
Ceramic objects, funerary urns and very old human skeletons were also recovered and are being analysed at the Xingó Museum. ‘Among the skeletons identified during the rescue project, the oldest is probably around 9,600 years old,’ says the professor from the Federal University of Sergipe.
The subsoil of the northeastern hinterlands is also rich in minerals and precious stones. Descending through a hole dug into the raw rock, as high as a 50-storey building, you reach a lift that looks more like a shower, where water keeps falling.
The tunnel has electric lighting and a pump removes the water that rises from between the rocks. ‘We make a gallery, one metre high by two metres wide, wood everything and enter here. This is where the stones are produced. This is where the emeralds come from,’ says one miner.
Using hammers, the miners search for the precious stones, but it’s not easy to find them. Many people depend on these mines. Even outside the mines, looking for a forgotten emerald in the rocks that have already been mined. ‘We have 9,800 people in the Serra da Carnaíba who make their living from mining. Nine thousand eight hundred people directly and, indirectly, that’s 60,000 people.’
The beauty of the sertão’s subsoil is its most precious jewel. Even underground in Brazil’s driest area, there is a treasure carved into every rock.
Brazilian prehistory at the Xingó Archaeological Museum
Discovered in 1991, the Justino Cemetery, located underground in the northeast, with 188 human skeletons accompanied by their ornaments and belongings used in life, was the first major prehistoric remains found in the lower São Francisco region, between the states of Alagoas and Sergipe.
It was the first sign that there was a real archaeological treasure there, which today makes up the collection of the Xingó Archaeology Museum (MAX) at the Federal University of Sergipe (UFS).
When researcher Cleonice Vergner and her team were carrying out archaeological salvage work requested of the university by the São Francisco Hydroelectric Company (Chesf) in 1988, she had no idea that she would find so many traces of Brazilian prehistory years later. The research began in the region that would be flooded by the Xingó hydroelectric dam, and then continued throughout the areas that were not flooded.
‘There is work for at least four generations,’ says Cleonice. On the banks of the São Francisco River, in the lower region, only two sites have been excavated out of the 255 discovered.
At these underground sites in the north-east, known as Letreiros and Vale dos Mestres, were the pieces, skeletons and ceramics that are now preserved and exhibited in the museum, in a refrigerated and musicalised environment, along with maps and miniatures that represent how those prehistoric peoples lived.
MAX‘s logo, a drawing of a bird that resembles a vulture, was also found in rock art sites, repeating itself in three different places. Between plateaus and river terraces, 41 sites are downstream from the dam and 214 at the mouth.
The museum has a team of 43 people working in the research laboratory in Xingó and at the central station in Aracaju. The excavations are carried out by the community itself in the towns of Paulo Afonso, Canindé, Olho D’Água and Piranhas. ‘Only the people who drew the pictures weren’t illiterate.
We taught the others to dig and made them literate. Today, they are doing supplementary education, four of them have already graduated through us, and one has become a master and works with us,’ says the researcher. ‘The project also had a social focus, integrating the community. Today the museum supports 217 people, including employees and their families.’
The Xingó Archaeology Museum is located in the municipality of Canindé do São Francisco, in Sergipe, which is 200 kilometres from the capital of Sergipe (four hours by bus) and has already been visited by more than 55,000 people in the last four years.
Emeralds, mines and caves in the subsoil of the northeastern hinterland.
Bahia.ws – Tourist Guide to Bahia and the Northeast of Brazil
