Niede Guidon, a Brazilian archaeologist whose work has questioned a long-term theory about how America was first populated by people, and who almost on his own transformed a hardscrabble region in the northeast of Brazil in the Serra da Capivara National Park, died in her house near the Neato. She was 92.
Marian Rodrigues, the director of the park, said the cause was a heart attack.
Dr. Guidon was perhaps best known in international scientific circles for her contesting findings that people arrived in North and South America 30,000 years ago. But few doubted her performance in tracing and storing hundreds of millennia-old rock paintings in a semi-aride, lined by cactus, impoverished angle of the state of Piauí.
In 1979, at its insistence, the Brazilian government made the area a national park, and in 1991, largely because of its, UNESCO, the cultural agency of the United Nations, declared a World Heritage Site. She then became an important role in the establishment of two museums in the neighborhood: the Museum of the American manHe opened in 1996, and the Museum of NatureIn 2018. And she had a major role in attracting investments in the city, which led to a new airport and a federal university campus and to greatly improve public education in the region.
“The best way to preserve the paintings was to keep the environment, and to keep the environment, you had to offer the people,” said Antoine Lourdeau, a French archaeologist who with Dr. from 2006 from 2006. Guidon worked on and out, in an interview. “I don’t think most archaeologists are aware of the social implications of their own work.”
Dr. Guidon was especially effective in training and hiring A biography from 2023 from Dr. Guidon. “I heard a lot, many moving testimonials from women who received financial autonomy and sent their men to hell,” a Portuguese expression, which means they left their partners, she said.
Apart from working for the park and the museums, some as guides and guards, produce many locals Honey And ceramic that are sold nationally by initiatives that Dr. Guidon started in the nineties.
Niede Guidon was born on March 12, 1933 in Jaú, a small city in the state of São Paulo. Although Neide is a popular Brazilian name, Niede is not. Her father’s side of the family was French and she was named after the Nied -River, who runs through France and Germany.
After studying natural history at the University of São Paulo and obtaining the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in 1958, Mrs. Guidon took a job as a teacher in the small and predominantly Roman Catholic town of Itápolis that year. But after he had corruption within the school at the beginning of 1959 on the basis of a magazine São Paulo, the city – hired by school managers – turned against her.
If a single woman who drove a car, skipped mass and taught evolution, she was an easy target in largely conservative Itápolis. Tensions grew and after violent protests they fled and two other female teachers, accompanied by police officers.
“The only thing that was missing to complete the medieval scene was a bonfire to burn the witches,” she told a reporter at the time, according to A podcast 2024 About her life.
Later that year she took Job at the Paulista Museum in São Paulo, and it was there that she became interested in archeology. During a photographic exhibition she had organized – from prehistoric Brazilian rockinings – visitors from the northeast of Brazil showed her photos of the paintings in Piauí, those she would devote her life to keeping.
But not for a while. Her first attempt to see them, in 1963, then failed the collapse of a bridge from gaining her access to the area. The following year she fled Brazil to Paris after she was tipped that she would soon be arrested by the new military dictatorship, which President João Goulart had overthrown to get power.
She studied archeology in France and eventually did a doctorate at the University of Paris in 1975, although she often returned to Brazil for fieldwork. In 1970 Dr. Guidon finally able to visit the rock paintings in Piauí. Stunned by their complexityShe started to visit them regularly and organize teams for days -long hikes through difficult terrain to catalog, which turned out to be hundreds of archaeological locations.
She returned to Brazil forever in 1986 and six years later she moved to São Raimundo Nonato, where she was known in the city as a ‘Doutora’ or doctor.
In the 1990s, excavations in the vicinity of the painting places – including carbon residues of supposed fire chains and broken brick tools – that laboratories date from 30,000 years ago. Dr. Guidon was surprised. But other scientists were very skeptical, especially those from the United States, who adhered to the Clovis model, named after an archaeological site in New Mexico, where evidence supported the theory that people probably arrived in America 13,000 years ago in America that the Bering Strait is now.
Although scientists generally agree that people arrived at the North -American continent a few thousand years earlier, the findings of Dr. Guidon still controversial. The question remains whether the materials that have been excavated near the painting places are made by people or by natural forces.
But her work brought attention, money and resources for Piauí, and even some of her academic critics recognize her performance.
“She was a state woman with a target feeling who knew how to convince people,” said André Strauss, an archaeologist at the University of São Paulo. He doubted some of the findings of Dr. Guidon, but nevertheless admired her charisma – so much so that he called her “the Churchill of Northeastern Brazil.” Just like Churchill, she had a flair for the dramatic, often threatening to pack and return to the more refined life that she led in Paris as an academic, according to the biography of Mrs. Abujamra.
But she never did that. In the morning of June 5, she was buried in the garden outside her house in São Raimundo Nonato.
- Advertisement -
