This article offers a challenge to previous interpretations of the ring villages of Central Brazil. Specifically, these large villages that were occupied by ceramic-making agriculturalists have been characterized as marginal and anomalous developments resulting from late population movements triggered by the European conquest. New data presented here show that the ring villages have a much greater time depth. Their sudden appearance around A. D. 800 is explained as a local response to both regional and external pressures. Information on settlement pattern variables such as village layout and size, differences in cultural inventory, and comparison of archaeological and ethnographic data illustrate sociopolitical and demographic changes through time that have critical implications for Amazonian archaeology.

Archaeology in Brazil shares many empirical similarities with Latin American and North American research but, as a social science, it has remained isolated from mainstream theoretical and methodological advances. The large size of the country, the lack of resources and government support, the difficulties of working in tropical environments, the lack of monumental architecture, and Brazil's being neither a Spanish- nor an English-speaking country have all been thought of as shaping Brazilian archaeology and its failure to integrate into a larger, Latin American or international context.