Qualla: Monte Alegre State Park https://qualla.com/monte-alegre-state-park en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 14 Sep 2026 09:25:05 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/6/z/9/k/monte-alegre-state-park-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Monte Alegre State Park https://qualla.com/monte-alegre-state-park Monte Alegre State Park: Introduction https://qualla.com/monte-alegre-state-park/ Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The figures are red and yellow, and they run for more than two hundred metres along a sandstone wall in the Serra do Ererê. Handprints. Concentric rings that people here read as suns. Stick-limbed animals, grids, a woman apparently caught in the act of giving birth. Most visitors to Monte Alegre State Park see only the lowest panel, the one legible from the foot of the hill, and that is already enough to make the point: somebody stood here, ground pigment, and worked on a rock face above the Amazon floodplain a very long time ago. Exactly how long ago is one of the more interesting arguments in American archaeology, and it has been running since 1996. The park is not large - 3,678 hectares of hills, valleys and caves on the north bank of the river, in the municipality of Monte Alegre, Pará - but it protects what may be the oldest rock art known in the Americas.

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]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/z/9/k/monte-alegre-state-park-wp/6z9k-monte-alegre-state-park-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Monte Alegre State Park: Hills in a Country of Flat Water https://qualla.com/monte-alegre-state-park/ Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Almost everything around here is floodplain. The Amazon at this latitude is a world of várzea and shallow lake and low green horizon, which is what makes the Monte Alegre uplands so startling: abrupt sandstone ranges, the Paytuna and the Ererê, standing out of it with cliffs, cav...

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Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/z/9/k/monte-alegre-state-park-wp/6z9k-monte-alegre-state-park-hills-in-a-country-of-flat-water.mp3 0:06 2 full Monte Alegre State Park: The Painted Rock https://qualla.com/monte-alegre-state-park/ Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. The Gruta da Pedra Pintada - Painted Rock Cave - opens on the eastern flank of the Paytuna range, 120 metres above sea level and 89 metres deep, a sequence of corridors and halls. Between 1990 and 1992 the American archaeologist Anna Curtenius Roosevelt excavated it, and what cam...

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Image: Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/z/9/k/monte-alegre-state-park-wp/6z9k-monte-alegre-state-park-the-painted-rock.mp3 0:06 3 full Monte Alegre State Park: An Argument About Eleven Thousand Years https://qualla.com/monte-alegre-state-park/ Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Roosevelt published in Science in 1996, and the challenge arrived quickly. C. Vance Haynes of the University of Arizona, a famously conservative reader of Paleoindian chronology, argued that a stricter statistical treatment of the same dates would pull the occupation no earlier t...

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]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/z/9/k/monte-alegre-state-park-wp/6z9k-monte-alegre-state-park-an-argument-about-eleven-thousand-years.mp3 0:06 4 full Monte Alegre State Park: The Other Caves https://qualla.com/monte-alegre-state-park/ Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Pedra Pintada draws the tourists, but it is one of many. The Gruta do Pilão holds paintings of its own and ranks among the oldest archaeological sites in the Amazon. The Gruta Itatupaoca, also called the Gruta da Capela, runs 56 metres into the southern slope of the Ererê range, ...

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]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/z/9/k/monte-alegre-state-park-wp/6z9k-monte-alegre-state-park-the-other-caves.mp3 0:06 5 full Monte Alegre State Park: A Park the Neighbours Helped Draw https://qualla.com/monte-alegre-state-park/ Photo credit Brazil_location_map.svg: NordNordWest derivative work: Виктор В (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Monte Alegre was the first conservation unit in Pará created with the participation of the people who live around it, an approach that grew out of state research institute studies at the end of the 1980s. The park was established by law in November 2001 at 5,800 hectares; a consu...

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]]> Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/z/9/k/monte-alegre-state-park-wp/6z9k-monte-alegre-state-park-a-park-the-neighbours-helped-draw.mp3 0:06 6 full