The portion of South America that is currently within the borders of Brazil has been occupied by humans for at least 11,000 years,

based on remains that have been discovered in the area, and archaeological evidence of early human rock art,

carvings, tools, and other such artifacts, including mound-based buildings that, when combined with other evidence, gestures at sophisticated

social stratifications that seemed to be primarily based on chieftoms similar to hierarchies found

elsewhere around the world at that point in social and technological development.

The Marjoara, sometimes called the Marajou culture,

was especially successful and prevalent in what is today northern Brazil, on an island at the

mouth of the Amazon River. They would seem to have hit their peak in terms of population and

development between 800 and 1400 AD. but there's evidence of human settlement

on that island as far back as 1000 BC. Theirs was not the only indigenous group active in

the region when the Portuguese arrived. In 1500 AD though, an estimated 7 million people, mostly semi-nomadic, except for the

aforementioned Marijuara, who were more settled, were living in what is modern-day Brazil,

when on April 22,500 Portuguese explorers claimed the area in the way of European conquerors at that time,

claims that were generally respected by other European conquerors, but which did not take

the will of the locals living in those claimed areas into account.

And they founded their first local colony a few decades later in 1532.

And this was a full colonization effort, which involved tamping down on the indigenous people,

often by intentionally stoking existing tribal conflicts, setting them against each other,

in order to gain regional advantage,

and setting up what would become sugar-gain plantations,

worked at first by the colonizers themselves,

then by employed or enslaved locals,

...