The BRASILIAE project focused on the place and role of Indigenous knowledge in the creation of science during the early modern period, specifically by researching how the book Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (Piso and Marcgraf, 1648) and its associated materials (such as drawings, sketches, scientific notes etc) were produced and used. In an encyclopaedic format, this book brings together textual and visual information about the natural world, linguistics, and geography of Brazil as understood and experienced by coastal Tupi indigenous populations, Dutch and Portuguese colonizers, and freed and enslaved Africans and Afro-Brazilians. The botanical and zoological sections of the HNB in particular present hundreds of encyclopedic entries that name, describe, and classify plants and animals based on (among others) Indigenous Tupi knowledge, and explain their function and uses by Luso-Brazilians, Indigenous, and/or African societies. This knowledge was subsequently re-interpreted by the authors and editor of the book, and presented in textual and visual format to a European early modern (scholarly) audience.
The BRASILIAE project therefore aimed at identifying these pieces of Indigenous, local, and Afro-Brazilian knowledges in their different forms: names and uses of plants and animals, scientific and artistic images, and knowledge-practices. By studying these, our goal was to understand how Indigenous peoples were part of the work done by scientists in that time period and context, and what kind of interactions were taking place between diverse segments of society in Dutch Brazil. Objects are also part of knowledge and science so, next to the book itself, our project also studied historic Indigenous objects in museums that can be connected to the time and context of the HNB. Finally, an important last objective of the project was to reconnect this past Indigenous knowledge to present-day descendant communities in Brazil.
