Living and Eating in Coastal Brazil during Prehistory Mercedes Okumura and Sabine Eggers, Universidade de São Paulo During the second half of the Holocene, almost the entire Brazilian coast was densely colonized by shellmound-building groups (Fig. .a and d). Around shellmounds have been recorded by the Brazilian Institute for the Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) but this is certainly an under-representation of what once existed (Gaspar , ). Shellmounds are found from the state of Rio Grande do Sul to Bahia and, whilst they are sparse in the north and north-east, they are particularly numerous in the south (from Rio de Janeiro to Santa Catarina state), which has been the focus of most research, including this paper. With a few exceptions, the shellmounds of southern Brazil date to between and , with a peak between and (Lima –, ). Physically, shellmounds can be huge, reaching metres in height and several hundred metres in diameter, as is often found in the state of Santa Catarina (Fig. .c). e large size and long duration of these sites suggest considerable human adaptation to the coastal environment. e Brazilian word for shellmounds is sambaqui, a Tupi word deriving from tamba, meaning mollusk, and ki, meaning accumulation (Prous , ). Brazilian shellmounds have been known since the sixteenth-century when Portuguese colonizers explored them as a commercial source of lime (Lima –, ). However, it was only in the nineteenth century that shellmounds began to be investigated by naturalists and amateurs who debated whether they were the result of natural or anthropic actions: the Brazilian scientific community finally reached a consensus that the shellmounds were intentionally built in the s (Lima –, ). By the late s Chmyz (, ) was able to define shellmounds as ‘artificial mounds of stratified shells, fish bones …, in which the proportion of shells usually is higher than per cent in relation to the other elements’. is highlights the fact that shellmounds contain materials other than shell and, of these materials, pottery is perhaps the most intensely studied cultural marker. Shellmound pottery is one of the few well-established chronological markers for the prehistoric Brazilian coast (Lima –, ) and its arrival seems to coincide with considerable changes in the lifestyle of these coastal groups (Lima –, ). e earliest pottery evidence on Brazilian coastal sites dates from , . It is usually divided into two groups, one in the states of Rio de Janeiro and Espirito Santo to the