Very little is known about the thousands of years that Brazil was inhabited exclusively by Indians . The first chroniclers who arrived with the Portuguese - Pedro Vaz da Caminha in 1500 and Gaspar Carvajal in 1540 - saw large villages, but nothing resembling the huge Aztec and Inca cities that the Spanish encountered. The fragile material traces left by Brazil's earliest inhabitants have for the most part not survived. The few exceptions - like the exquisitely worked glazed ceramic jars unearthed on Marajó island in the Amazon - come from cultures that have vanished so completely that not even a name records their passing.

The Indians fascinated the Portuguese, and many of the first Europeans to visit Brazil sent lengthy reports back home. The most vivid account was penned by a German mercenary, Hans Staden , who spent three nervous years among the cannibal Tupi after being captured in 1552. He tells how they tied his legs together, "& and I was forced to hop through the huts, at which they made merry, saying Here comes our food hopping towards us.'" Understandably, his memoirs were one of the first bestsellers in European history, and contained much accurate description of an Indian culture still largely untouched by the colonists. The work of Staden and the first explorers and missionaries is a brief snapshot of Indian Brazil in the sixteenth century, a blurred photograph of a way of life soon to be horribly transformed.

It was unfortunate that the Portuguese first landed in the only part of Brazil where ritualized cannibalism was practised on a large scale; away from the Tupi areas it was rare. Nowhere was stone used for building. There was no use of metal or the wheel, and no centralized, state-like civilizations on the scale of Spanish America. There are arguments about how large the Indian population was: Carvajal described taking several days to pass through the large towns of the Omagua tribe on the Amazon in 1542 but, away from the abundant food sources on the coast and the banks of large rivers, population densities were much lower. The total number of Indians was probably around five million. Today there are two hundred thousand in Brazil.