The Tupian Expansion

This chapter explores the expansion of the Tupian peoples across greater Amazonia to better understand the mechanisms and processes of cultural and linguistic contact and change. Tupian languages are or were spoken among indigenous groups distributed from the Brazilian Atlantic coast through Paraguay to the eastern Andean slopes of Peru. The investigation uses GIS (Geographical Information Systems) to map the spatial distribution of cultural and linguistic features associated with Tupi-speaking groups in order to plot the historical expansion of the Tupians and to characterize the sociocultural context and consequences of these events, particularly relating to internal and external contact situations. Research is directed toward multi-disciplinary integration of linguistic data with cultural data derived from anthropology, archaeology, ethnohistory, and geography, in order to reach a multifaceted understanding of the history of contact and exchange of Tupian groups. The chapter breaks new ground in combining traditional studies of material culture with linguistic data, as well as in mapping and investigating the spatial distribution of linguistic features and their relationship to other cultural attributes