A precious little book arrived in the hands of this scribe, one of the first whose objective is to show the richness of Brazil’s deep past to children and young people. It is about “Rentchin” (published by Telos), written by the bioanthropologist Rodrigo Elias de Oliveira, from USP, and beautifully illustrated by the artist Nat Grego. The image below, I believe, says (almost) it all.
The marriage between drawings and text is tremendously harmonious, as it should be in any good book aimed at children. It makes you want to spend hours looking at the beautiful and extremely accurate reproductions of archaeological artifacts found in sites all over Brazil (above, for example, we see, on the left, typical drawings of vases from the island of Marajó, while on the right we have an anthropomorphic funerary urn, or in the form of people, from Amapá). There is not an ugly page in this book, gentle reader.
The title character, the young indigenous Rentchin (or Jonas, when he is out of his village), lives in a large reserve in the Atlantic Forest between São Paulo and Paraná and begins his journey as a curious curumim, who wants to use so much ancestral knowledge of his ethnicity and the science he learns at school to understand his past.
Oliveira’s text skillfully mixes the lyrical side of Rentchin’s discoveries with good explanations of the main elements that archaeologists use to reconstruct the deep past, such as the analysis of cave paintings, stone and ceramic artifacts or the marks left by habits or diseases in human skeletons. Highly recommended!
For those who want to know more about the work of the bioanthropologist, it is worth checking out this column I wrote in sheet and also a report I did for National Geographic Brasil magazine.
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