Guidon was born in Jau, Sao Paulo, on 12 March 1933. She studied natural history at the University of Sao Paulo, then went to Paris for a doctorate in prehistory under Andre Leroi-Gourhan and Annette Laming-Emperaire — two of the most influential figures in twentieth-century European rock-art scholarship. She came back to a country under military dictatorship and to a region that most of Brazilian science had never bothered to look at.\n\nWhat she did there went well beyond digging. In 1978 she petitioned the federal government to protect the area, and Serra da Capivara National Park was created the following year. She served as its head archaeologist. She built museums and research centres, and she built programmes the archaeology did not require: schools, health care, sustainable-development work in the rural settlements around the park. She was given the Prince Claus Award and a Ford conservation prize, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 — an unusual honour for an archaeologist, and a fair reflection of what the job had become.

The museum sits inside the headquarters of FUMDHAM, the Fundacao Museu do Homem Americano, which Guidon founded in 1986 and led as president until 2020. The foundation grew directly out of the Brazilian-French scientific collaboration that had been working the region since 1973, and it kept that hybrid character: a non-profit philanthropic civil society that operates in partnership with municipal, state and federal government rather than under any of them.\n\nThat arrangement has been both the foundation's strength and its exposure. It has allowed FUMDHAM to keep working through funding gaps that would have shut a purely federal operation. It has also meant a permanent scramble for money. In early 2017 the foundation took on formal responsibility within a shared management committee for Serra da Capivara National Park, a model instituted by the Piaui state government and Brazil's Ministry of Culture that also brings in ICMBio, the federal biodiversity agency, and IPHAN, the national heritage institute. Four bodies now hold the park between them.

The collection is the physical residue of more than forty years of excavation inside the park — and it grows, because the digging has never stopped. The permanent exhibition takes an ambitious line, opening not with Brazil but with the deep evolutionary background of hominids and tracking the human story forward to the arrival of European colonisers in the Americas.\n\nAlong the way there are funerary urns, lapidary work, drawings, skeletons and loose bone, and reconstructions of the fauna and flora of the region during the Pleistocene and Holocene — the vanished wet forest and heavy animals of a Piaui that no longer exists. A dedicated section deals with the excavations at Boqueirao da Pedra Furada, whose contested early dates are the reason many visitors come at all. The exhibition closes by turning to the present: the living biodiversity of Serra da Capivara, the caatinga as it stands today, the capuchins and the deer and the birds that still use the same canyons as the painters.

Sao Raimundo Nonato has fewer than 39,000 residents and sits roughly 536 kilometres from Teresina. Its economy runs overwhelmingly on services — better than three-quarters of local output — which in a place like this is another way of saying that the park, the foundation and the federal university campus are the economy. The Universidade Federal do Vale do Sao Francisco maintains a campus in town, and the airport opened in 2015, both of them consequences of a decision made in a rock shelter in 1973.\n\nThis is the part of Guidon's legacy that does not fit in a display case. She argued, consistently and sometimes furiously, that a heritage site cannot be protected against the people who live around it — only with them. The museum is where that argument is made in public: not a vault for objects removed from a landscape, but the front door of a place that a few thousand people still call home.