Within reach....

Fingers crossed, fingers crossed: Here goes my attempt at not jinxing mine (or Indy´s) chances at the treasure....

For those of you who don´t know, which is probably most of you, I´m here in Brazil for three reasons:

1) to work for my professor Don Nelson in the Northeast of Brazil during the month of July. I´ve been working as his research assistant for the last half-year, putting together a pretty large relational geodatabase....more on that perhaps at some point.
Working for him is great on a number of levels, but one bonus is that it ´requires´me to come to Brazil (you can probably hear my arm being twisted).

So with a job in Brazil this summer I thought I´d tack on two extra weeks on each side of the trip (hey, it´s a long trip down here and this is where my research is), so...

2) reason two is to visit my fieldsite in the southeast of the Amazonian state of Para (see below)


Visualizar My fieldsite em um mapa maior

and

3) to visit the militaries archives in Rio de Janeiro.

For those of you who have gotten lost as I´ve switched dissertation topics over time (I don´t blame you, half the time I forget...) I´m doing research on the learning and landscape change within the Brazilian Landless Workers´Movement-MST). As part of this research, I want to understand how the landscape in the southeastern Amazon has changed over time. Particularly, I´m interested in questions about histories of land use, i.e. when was the region first deforested, the early 20th century, the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s? You get the point....

So, to help me understand this process of landscape change I´ve become very interested in satellite photos and aerial photos (from airplanes). (Un)fortunately, while aerial photo archives in the US are easily accessbile online (dating back to the mid-1930s) in Brazil, their existence, location, and time series was a needle in a haystack-hence reason # 3 for coming to Brazil.

In an effort to make this blog post a little shorter here´s a quicker summary:
After about a year of talking with people all over the United States, and Brazil (people who alternately told me ´no these photos definitely don´t exist; maybe, these photos might exist is Rio or maybe in Manaus or maybe in Belem (the equivalent of saying you should go to either D.C., Miami, or Seattle, one of those place might have what you´re looking for...), and Yes, those photos should exist somewhere) I got back down to Brazil, and went to the military archives in Rio.

Why the Military archives? Well, for those who need a brush up on Brazilian history, the military dictaroship controlled the country from 64-84 or so and, being the military, have an airforce and hence airplanes and hence...you get the picture (couldn~t help that one). Anyways, so it turns out there are various military archives here in Rio....great. Well after three days of going around and being told No, no, no.....

BINGO! (finger´s crossed, finger´s crossed)



In a dusty old room, in a dusty old building, filled with these giant filing cabinets...I think I found my treasure.

The treasure? Photo indices. The indices document the flight plans (think of when you open a road atlas and it has a big map of the country with squares indicating on what page the map of say Georgia would be....that´s the type ofindex I´m referring to)

After talking for a while with the military officer (waiting for the inevitable ´sorry´, he said, that area, right there,...oh yeah, we got that.

Dumbfounded silence.

You mean you´ve got that here?

Oh yeah. Right here...

and he goes and pulls out a sheath of yellowed photo indices from the 1960s.

The only stumbling block (for one not so well trained as ole Indy here) is that you can imagine that photos taken at 30,000 feet over the Amazon (think many many rivers) might be hard to seperate....that´s where past research and my laptop come in handy. Tomorrow morning I will be spending some quality time with Major Nuçez and the GIS database I have on the Amazon, looking at the lat/long coordinates on the various photos and determining where my field site is and what years of photos exist.....

Now how was it that Indy got that golden statue out of the temple....(that´s a post for tomorrow...but I have a few tricks up my sleeve)