Nouvelles découvertes d'art rupestre au Mato Grosso (Cidade de Pedra, Rondonópolis, Brésil)1

Since 1983, Professor Agueda Vilhena-Vialou is conducting in Mato Grosso (Brazil) the French-brasilian archeological mission Fossil men and their paleo-environments in the Paraná basin. Its goal is the study of the first prehistoric settlements of Latin America's heart, in their economic, social, cultural and symbolic dimensions. Thanks to the complementary and comparative analysis of the habitats, the regional settlements and the rock art, our research targets a more precise definition of territories and cultures proper of the prehistoric human groups from the South of the actual Mato Grosso state. The study of rock art, the most revealing aspect of symbolic behaviours, is one of the strongest programs inside our multidisciplinary team. Today, thanks to systematic prospections led along the Rio Vermelho (between Pantanal swamp at West and Rondonópolis city at East), a hundred rock art sites (walls, shelters and caves), decorated with signs, animals and humans, have been discovered, and, for the most of them, studied. These figures are painted, engraved and more rarely sculpted. Along those pages, the author is presenting the preliminary analysis of ten new rock art sites, recently identified in a cliff on the right bank of the Vermelho River. He starts a comparative study with the sites of the Cidade de Pedra and of close micro basin, from the left bank of the River. This research is showing the symbolic identities, both common and specific, proper to different territories of this major rock art region of Brazil, which is divided in several areas and micro territories, shared but autonomous.