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Before 1500 CEReputable source · 2 sourcesEstimated

Millions of Indigenous People Inhabit Brazil Before Contact

Hundreds of tribes and four major language families across a territory later called Brazil

On the timeline · around Before 1500 CE · Indigenous Peoples and ContactIndigenous Peoples and ContactMillions of Indigenous People Inhabit Brazil Before Contact1,000 BCE750 BCE500 BCE250 BCE1 CE250 CE500 CE750 CE

Quick facts

Denevan estimate
3,625,000 in the Amazon Basin, 4,800,000 elsewhere
Hemming estimate
2,431,000 for Brazil as a whole
Major language families
Ge, Tupi, Carib, Arawak, plus Nambicuara
First met by Portuguese
Tupi speakers of the coast

What happened

Long before any European reached the coast, the territory that became Brazil held a native population in the millions, divided among hundreds of tribes and separate language groups. The Library of Congress country study records four major language families: Ge, Tupi, Carib, and Arawak speakers, plus the Nambicuara. The Tupi speakers, who had displaced the Ge along the coast, were the peoples the Portuguese met first in 1500. Population estimates vary widely: demographer William M. Denevan suggested 3,625,000 people for Brazil's Amazon Basin alone, with another 4,800,000 in other regions, while historian John Hemming estimated more conservatively at 2,431,000 for Brazil as a whole. These figures are reconstructions, not counts, and scholars disagree on them by millions.

Why it matters

The size and diversity of Brazil's pre-contact population is the baseline against which the colonial catastrophe is measured. Within decades of contact, tens of thousands of these people died of smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, typhoid, dysentery, and influenza, with whole peoples likely annihilated without ever meeting a European, as disease traveled ahead of the colonists along Indigenous trade routes.

How we know

The population figures come from the Library of Congress country study's summary of the competing estimates by Denevan and Hemming, and the Tupi peoples' role as the first met by the Portuguese is documented in both the country study and Brown University's Brazil: Five Centuries of Change.

Sources

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Part of a timelineHistory of Brazil24 events · A land of hundreds of nations before 1500, the destination of nearly half of all enslaved Africans brought to the Americas, and the only monarchy the New World's republics ever toleratedView all →