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The Handling of Chronotope. The Candidature of the Chapada do Araripe Socio-Biodiverse Basin for UNESCO World Heritage Status

Jorge Mattar Villela (UFSCar)1

Amir Geiger (UniRio)




In this essay, we address, in a tentative and tangential manner, the ways in which the sciences are called upon to manifest themselves at the heart of a UNESCO Candidature process for the Chapada do Araripe to be recognised as a ‘mixed heritage site’.2 This process is based, ipso facto, on an enormous depth of geological and palaeontological time and subordinates it to the continuity and preservation of its ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ aspects in the present and future. According to UNESCO criteria, created in the 21st century, ‘mixed heritage’ specifically refers to the association or inseparability of these aspects. We consider that this specific candidature process (which we have called, for brevity, the Chapada candidature, or just the candidature) has an anti-confiscatory appeal, that is, of resistance and alternative to the various confiscations that are now under way in the Chapada region, and to the pitfalls that heritage institutions and policies may imply in this sense. In this regard, we suggest the tendency towards the destratification of thought that emanates from the candidacy. As with any other candidature for UNESCO certification, there are some confiscatory processes associated with the Chapada candidature, but we will not discuss it in this text.

Since 2019, the Casa Grande Foundation (FCG), located in Nova Olinda/CE and the epicentre of the candidature, and SESC/CE (the cultural sector of FECOMERCIO, a financial supporter), have been organising annual seminars aimed at preparing the dossier that, in 2027, according to the schedule established in 2024, will be drafted and submitted to UNESCO. The audiovisual documentation of these meetings totals approximately 150 hours and is available on the FCG’s YouTube channel. These events are simultaneously scientific (a very prominent aspect); cultural (a central and frequent word in the candidature); political (mixed with several of the others, but little claimed by others); pedagogical (in fact, instructive, as are those of professionals working in heritage and preservation institutes), testimonial (as are those of masters of culture, farmers, quilombolas and technicians invited to report on other experiences of national and international candidatures, some successful and others, fewer in number, still in progress). And they are all, in short, events celebrating the Chapada as a central place in the world. Of the six seminars already held, only four are available on the Fundação Casa Grande channel. The list of supporters of the candidature is very broad, global, and full of celebrities from various fields of human activity, as well as residents of the Chapada. The seminars constitute the bulk of the material in this research.

The multivocal discursivity of those seminars is expressed in images that gain depth in stratigraphy, in the evocation of series of layers (temporal-spatial). These images can be presented in the style of a guide (i.e., succinct and strict guidance/information); or in a kind of ‘geology in the wild’3 (for example: ‘the first formers of the territory are tectonic plates’), in scientific aggregates such as Geology-Palaeontology-Archaeology operating in the region (science is done by scientists working in institutions there and, in certain cases, by scientists also from there, often associated with international research networks4). They can also present themselves in a complex stratification that mixes nature with artifice, politics, business, and the existential. We only mention here these ‘inclusive disjunctions’, but they were not sufficiently addressed in the course of this research.

We provisionally call this distribution of time in place (and concomitant demultiplication of place into temporalities) ‘chronotope’, aware of the need for extended ethnographic adjustments to be made to the uses given to it by the creator of the concept.5

The chronotope of the candidature should be understood as the arrangement (and, as a corollary, the materialisation) of time in a region in written form, such as the submission of a project to a call for proposals, an article to a publisher, or an anthropological report to the courts6.  For the purposes of this paper, chronotope also takes on the meaning of an elusive, irreducible movement, which does not lend itself to stratification.

Fossil of the newly described mayfly Incogemina nubila, discovered in the Crato Formation of the Araripe Basin (Ceará, Brazil). Image: Universidade Regional do Cariri (URCA)

In the candidature’s standardised discourse as delivered to IPHAN, for instance, there is a solidity, a rock bottom that gives concreteness to what Walter Benjamin phrased as ‘far back into the mists of time’. But at the same time, the interlacing of Geology with history-culture (both as discourse and as predicament), makes evident that there are passages, or extrusions from this depth of time outside the candidature’s volume (again, discursive and historical). The solid foundation is the emergence-imminence of the Chapada in the Lower Palaeozoic, 500 million years ago. The next stratum, in this same discursive plane, is the fossil record whose existence is due to the first event, the geological one. In the context of the candidature, the determination goes beyond the thin layer of the biosphere. Were it not for the elevation caused by the movement of tectonic plates, were it not for the continental drift that divided Gondwana into two continents, there would have been no rifting and flooding in the Lower Cretaceous, in the stage called Albian, 150 million years ago. Geology considers this continental drift to be responsible for the formation of the South Atlantic, the so-called ‘Afro-Brazilian depression’, which extends throughout the interior of the Northeast region. Without this continental movement, the lakes would not have formed in cycles of salinisation and desalinisation. In some of these lakes, the low-oxygen environment allowed anaerobic bacteria, through their fermentation processes, to secrete substances that formed biosarcophagi (a glue, or mucilage) that enveloped dead animals, protecting them from predators and dismemberment caused by the tides. Inside these sarcophagi, a chamber was created that was favourable to the instantaneous mineralisation of the animals that died there, especially insects, fishes, and crustaceans7. The Chapada is world-famous for the fossilisation of animals with their viscera. This vast duration, its vertigo, can be felt (not conceived) in the poignant images – of sharp, almost photographic instantaneity – of a shrimp larva in the stomach of a fish or a fossilised heart or a moth in the vividness of its contours. But the Chapada is also world-renowned in the field of fossil repatriation, led by the Placido Cidade Nuvem Museum of Palaeontology in Santana do Cariri, a municipality with a population of 17,000. This fame is evidenced by an article in Nature magazine and a long article in Royal Society Open Science that characterise the MPCN as a ‘world centre for the decolonisation of palaeontology’. The museum, led by its director, Prof. Allyson Pinheiro, carcinologist from the University of the Cariri Region, together with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, repatriated 2.5 tonnes of fossils from French museums alone and was responsible for the repatriation of the famous (as it was then known) Ubirajara jubatus, which was in the Museum of the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. The repatriation was accompanied by the withdrawal of the article that described and named this theropod specimen, whose morphology transformed the taxonomy of dinosaurs.

Rock paintings from the Santa Fé archaeological shelter in Crato, Ceará, depicting elements of the cultural imagination of the Kariri people. Image: Sesc Ceará

The stratigraphic chronotopia of the candidature spans from the Lower Cretaceous to the prehistory of the region. The graphic tradition, which is the visible landmark in the prehistoric stratum, is estimated to date back 3,000 years. This is ‘the symbol’ (educational, public, institutional, commercial and scientific) of the ‘Man of Kariri’, of ‘prehistoric man, but also of the prehistoric boy, who is never mentioned and, consequently, of prehistoric mothers’ (as Francisco Alemberg Souza Lima often says, who, with his late wife, Dr Rosiane Limaverde, created and promoted the candidature). The bas-relief carves of what archaeologists interpret as tuiuiús birds, painted red on a friable rock characteristic of the Santana Formation, archeologists suggest, have been maintained by continuous pigmentation for over 250 generations, without overlapping or replacing the images. This is the symbol of the FCG, drawn on the shirts of the children who attend it. The Anhanguera santanea (from whose crest Cariri palaeontologists obtained melanin), a pterosaur that is one of the biggest stars in the fight against fossil trafficking, is a symbol of the palaeontological stratum, although it competes with the dragonflies of the Cretaceous and the stone-hearted Racholepis. The tuiuiús are also iconic and indexical archaeosigns of life in the Chapada because they depend on large amounts of water to live and, therefore, are no longer living inhabitants over there. Indeed, in present time, they are found only in Pantanal, a very humid biome in Central Brazil. The Chapada is (and was a long time ago) anauá, ‘place of water’, mostly, in our days, subterranean waters. It is a kind of gigantic sponge that disperses what it collects, and hydrates a region much larger than itself. These archaeosigns indicate the presence of a site that is both archaeological and mythological (this is the suggestion of the dissertation and thesis by Rosiane Limaverde, the creator of ‘inclusive social archaeology’, regarding the Santa Cruz Site). The Kariri Goddess, the Mãe d’Água (Mother of the Waters) is also engraved alongside with tutiuús birds.

Dragonfly, Santana do Cariri. Image: Araripe Global Geopark.

The next stratum is the present. Is there a ‘symbol’ for it?

The candidature’s present is an extended time, filled with the past that incessantly swells, turned towards the future that thickens and transforms the past. Deep time is, of course,  extended in the research carried out within the relevant sciences. In its dizzying thickness (it is necessary to repeat this qualifier), the present gains momentum to launch itself firmly into the future. But in the face of the present, of its speed, the past flattens out. The present, in the strict sense, encompasses colonisation. And this presence, its shadows, imply densifications and complications, which in turn require extensive elucidation, which we must renounce at this moment.

Just as it happened millions and thousands of years ago, there will be extinctions in the times we live in (perhaps a ‘mass’ and ‘instantaneous’ extinction, as they say in Geology, which studies extinctions when they occur over a few tens of thousands of years). In order to inhabit this time of extinctions and formulate new problems with it and its inhabitants, to participate in learning about what is to come (but above all formulated by those who will live it, namely children that are able to relate and be related to fossils, cross-stratigraphically, so to speak), it is necessary to create a safeguard for the dimensions of the Chapada do Araripe (and in proportion with the complexity of the relationships that the candidature mobilises and values). This is one of the central arguments of the candidature. The Chapada is already surrounded by some legal and notarial safeguards: the first National Forest in Brazil bordered by an Environmental Protection Area (APA) and dotted with Geosites, which together form the first Geopark in the Americas, already chancelled by UNESCO in 2006. ‘Anthropic action’ (the candidature does not name those responsible: gypsum mining and Araripe-stone mining, two materials that are also themes of geology) and agribusiness risks altering a past – not merely its traces, its remains, or vestiges –, a whole dimension that, in the candidature’s argument, has a maximum (not ultimate) power to determine things as they are, as they come to be, and as they will be. Once the past has been dissolved by the anthropic present, there will be no expectation of a future; anti-symmetrically, when expectations of future are empty, the past must be reclaimed. This is how the candidature intends to express its chronotope to UNESCO and thus justify the need for the Seal.

Turned to the future (the open, indecipherable and unpredictable stratum), the candidature exists for the sake of those who will live in the future (a truism, though not an obvious one), but above all it exists to be performed by them. Hence, the presence of children in the Foundation is of utmost importance. Let us say, protagonism in active learning. There, children and young people are directors, organisers, masters of ceremony, filmmakers. Anna Beatriz Diniz, for example, at the age of 14, was the Director of the Kariri Man Memorial. Another young person, Junior dos Santos, one of the former ‘children of the Foundation’, is the creator of a project that crisscrosses all strata of the chronotope: the Organic Museums. Another coordinates the training of those who apply for this status. As we only have two sentences to talk about them: everything, from any stratum, under the thread of years of training, can become an organic museum. They are among the biggest stars of the (fu)tourist argument for the Chapada candidature. For, as we well know, there is no heritage without tourism (with the possibility always existing of counter-colonising the activity itself).

The candidature takes shape as a volume made up by various paths; even though it is itself this volume that grows and develops by opening up many paths. We see them, volume and paths, as stratigraphic chronotopes. And it is in this volume that the strata touch each other, forming pluralistic stratifications. Suffice it to mention the example of the Geosite of Colina do Horto do Padre Cícero, which we consider of ethnographic value, given the confusion it caused among the delegation of academic consultants from UNESCO (the members of Unitwin invited to make a consultative visit to the Candidature): what is this priest who generated a movement of pilgrims doing at the top of a stratigraphic chronotope that deals with rocks, stones, mineralised animals and prehistoric records? Especially there, where one of the oldest mineral formations on the planet emerges, the granitic rocks from the depths of the Earth, that were pushed to the surface from the Precambrian era. ‘Why is this a geosite?’ asked the delegation coordinator, a Greek archaeologist, professor at the UNESCO Chair at Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne University and former member of the UNESCO final approval committee, intrigued. The guide’s first reaction was to say, ‘But it has already been approved by UNESCO and has been reapproved five times since 2006, every four years.’ Another response to this question, richer than the defensive one, incorporates the sacred into the strata, and not only there, but in prehistory as well. Such a response constitutes a justification that gives the stratigraphy of the candidature’s chronotope its pluralistic richness. It refers and appeals to the non-stratifiable, because in the volume or complexity of the candidature (as it is expressed in the various voices that compose it and that are spoken in the seminars) the strata not only proliferate but pluralise themselves entering into different compositions.

Geossítio Ponte de Pedra. Image: Jorge Mattar Villela

Paradoxically, however, this occurs without the chronotope itself becoming stratified. If the chronotope is the material stratification of time in speech what can remain of sayability in the unstratified chronotope? Archaeology carried out within the scope of the candidature, accompanied by the Palaeontology that is done there (this passage was said at the VI Seminar by the aforementioned professor Allysson Pinheiro), says that the ancient Kariri experienced the deep time expressed in fossils through ‘myths’ and ‘legends’. The inhabitants of the spirit world turned to stone when they crossed the border that marks the separation between their world and ours. Geologically, this border is a stone bridge. Within the scope of UNESCO, it is one of the Geosites that dot the Chapada.

We know little about this subject beyond this account. We do know, however, that an effort is underway to incorporate into the research on deep time that archaeology and palaeontology usually formulate, each on its own, the experience of deep time that is not revealed by their procedures, methods, criteria, and writing regimes. The palaeontology and archaeology carried out in Chapada are, from an anthropological point of view, truly cutting-edge. An article published by authors from local universities in one of the journals of the academic hub Nature, proposes the collaboration of these two sciences of deep time (which make past intelligible by stratifying it), privileging the deep time of experience, that is, of another, very ancient experience of these temporalities. The inspection of deep time by people who no longer exist and about whom nothing is known. Nothing, at least, with regard to the subject of the article sets of petroglyphs associated with a set of dinosaur footprints.8 There, the evident relationship between the graffiti artists of a period between nine and two thousand years ago and the traces left by beings who no longer exist is evident. The theropods and sauropods that walked millions of years ago left only marks for ancient humans, just as the graffiti artists who, according to the article, incorporated them into their symbolic universe, left them for scientists who, although ignorant of the meaning of the petroglyphs, understand that they signified the footprints as such. Giving voice to Native Americans, even if that voice is silent and incomprehensible, is the political-epistemological cry of this unique alliance between archaeology and palaeontology. The sciences of stratification, combined with the sciences of the first inhabitants, reveal the non-stratifiable in a declared alliance with the Candidature.

In the Candidature, the unstratifiable is stated by the Casa Grande Foundation through one of its two founders, Alemberg Quindins. First, as we have already seen, in the maximum, but not ultimate, determination attributed to tectonic plates (which are not indeterminable, since ultimate determination always recedes; in certain cases, even to Creation (according to Babylonian-Judeo-Christian accounts): they are ‘the first formers of the territory’. They move, inhabit a moving subsoil, in continuous variation. They open rifts, create oceans, raise plateaus and settle them again. Their creative force is astonishing and inevitable. Secondly, there is another determination that occupies the same precedence as the plates and the same capacity for creation: sound.

At the Foundation, art is at the heart of everything. First and foremost, music. Or rather, sound, which takes precedence. Every landscape, in this Candidature environment, is sonic. In this regard, the sciences that are presented or called upon to constitute the unavoidable guarantees for the Candidature (in the sense of submitting a dossier) bend (mal gé bon gré) to certain distributions of time and things that risk becoming folklore. Even within the scope of the Candidature (in the sense of submission), the sciences bend to what is called ‘beliefs, myths and legends’ – and art. Myths and art, especially music (and, before that, sound) are means of expressing the unspeakable, the unstratifiable, movement. This, we dare say, is the inspiration or driving force behind the candidature, now rebellious, which does not intend to bow down to UNESCO. The candidature, it was repeatedly said in one seminar, ‘vem debaixo do barro do chão’ (comes from beneath the clay soil), citing a famous verse, composed by a great Brazilian musician who is also one of the candidature’s many supporters.

The unstratifiable aspect of the candidature is no longer a request or a submission, it is an offer, a gift. The Chapada, the body of time, no longer asks for World Heritage status from an international body, that is, one formed by nation states. The Chapada, according to the new name of its Candidature, gives humanity. So, it seems to be a gift that intends to be persuasive or, at least, inspiring. But, in the struggle for uniqueness, this gift can only be ratified by means of a Seal that guarantees that the very powerful forces that will certainly destroy it in a few decades are kept at bay.


By calling for collaboration between two sciences that have remained separate from each other due to the chronological gap between the events they seek to examine (in order to give them some intelligibility in the present); by summoning to this mutuality of archaeology and palaeontology the knowledge of people about whom almost nothing is known today (but who are invoked as ancestors); when the sacred is claimed as the core of a territorial memory, as in the case of the tuiuiús graphism of Sítio Santa Cruz (the aforementioned symbol of the prehistoric stratum), in these circumstances, we dare to say, an unstratifiable plane emerges, which we think is fit to be named the ‘plan de consistence’, which we think is fit to be named the ‘plan de consistence’, thereby recovering the formidable concept created by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.9

Thus, candidature is a word that names more than one thing. It is like an image, a projection that transforms itself according to the screen that interrupts the beams emitted by more than one projector. The difficult expressibility of the ‘plan de consistence’ is realised in the body of the article that inspired and guided us, ‘A remarkable assemblage of petroglyphs and dinosaur footprints in Northeast Brazil’. It reveals a remarkable and very specific ‘agencement’ (fossilised dinosaur footprints and petroglyphs thousands of years old) before which we find ourselves in the midst of the presentification of these ancestral voices that come from the stones, from the territory, to be returned to children, future companions and performers of an anthropology that provides multispecies sciences.


  1. Head of Axis 3 of the FAPESP Thematic Project: Metis. “Arts and Semantics of Creation and Memory” (proc. 2020/07886-8). This research are due to this project and funding from FAPESP.
    I would like to express my gratitude above all to the people of the Casa Grande Foundation, who welcomed me with their characteristic generosity: Alemberg Quindins, Suelânia de Souza, and Heloisa Bitu. I would also like to thank Jessica Ohara, Coordinator of Cultural Heritage and Memory, and especially Vanessa Albuquerque, Culture Analyst, both from the Ceará Department of Culture, for the attention they have given me. []
  2. Chapada do Araripe is a geological formation with an average altitude of 800 metres, covering an area of 1,800,000 hectares and stretching 180 kilometres. It is located at the junction of the states of Ceará, Pernambuco and Piauí, in the Bioma Caatinga in north-eastern Brazil, the most populous and biodiverse semi-arid region in the world. []
  3. To paraphrase Michel Callon in ‘What does it mean to say that economics is performative?’. []
  4. This is the case of Heloisa Bitu, one of the authors of an article on fossilised dinosaur footprints and ancient petroglyphs found in the region (an article that served as our main reference and will be discussed in a special section later in this paper), who is the director of archaeology at FCG. []
  5. This is not an application of the concept (if it is indeed a concept), but rather a non-repayable loan. At this point of this research, let us stick with these definitions: chronotopes are centers of organization of events, and it is from them that the meanings that generate the plots arise; the chronotope provides a terrain for events; it is the materialization of time in space, it depends on space to materialize; it is a concretization, a materialization, but one that is figurative. In any case, after all, all language is chronotopic. A chronotope is what characterizes a style. []
  6. This on the one hand. On the other, metadiscourses and discursive standardisations such as those of justice, public notices, etc., can perhaps be considered fossilisations of chronotopes. []
  7. Studies of regions known as Konservat-Lagerstätten show that the very rare fossilisation of integumentary tissues and viscera is a biotic process that forms ‘microbiotic mats’ capable of enveloping the dead organism in a protective layer, inside which microorganisms replace the tissues with, in the case of the fossils found in Chapada, pyrite. []
  8. Leonardo Troiano (Iphan), Heloísa Bitu (FCG), Tito Aureliano (URCA) and Aline Ghillardi (UFRN), 2024. ‘A Remarkable Assemblage of Petroglyphs and Dinosaur Footprints’. Scientific Reports. 14. This tendency to incorporate the geological knowledge of other peoples into scientific knowledge of deep time appears to a large extent in the anthropology of indigenous anthropologist Zoe Todd and Hellenist Adrienne Mayor, for example. We highlight only these two authors due to lack of space and because one deals with fossils and the other is an important reference for the article in question. []
  9. ‘Plan de consistence’ is what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called the non-stratifiable in Mille-Plateaux, 45 years ago. It ‘is traversed by heterogeneous things and signs, a semiotic fragment, a chemical attraction’. Everything that consists is real. It is the destratified, the decoded, the deterritorialised. ‘Abolishing all metaphor, the ‘plan de consistence’ ignores differences in level and magnitude and ignores all differences between the artificial and the natural.’ It is not a programme; it is a diagram. Struggle and alliance between diagram and programme. The plan de consistence is the multiplicity. This is where stratification comes from. Geological, organic, anthropomorphic, language, and social strata ‘are all strata resulting from a process in which there is only diagram’. The plane of consistency is a ‘surface of stratification’ and a stratum is ‘a more compact plane of consistency between two layers’. The plane of consistency, the surface of stratification, are assemblages. []

OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Jorge Mattar Villela, Amir Geiger (24 de noviembre de 2025). The Handling of Chronotope. The Candidature of the Chapada do Araripe Socio-Biodiverse Basin for UNESCO World Heritage Status. Ankulegi antropologia espazio digitala - espacio digital de antropología. Recuperado 13 de marzo de 2026 de https://doi.org/10.58079/159zx


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