Pilar de Goiás: a vila entre a memória, a história e a materialidade

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the interface established between historical archeology, history and the national policy of protection of historical, artistic, architectural and archaeological heritage - through the legal instrument of tipping - materialized in the case of the city of Pilar de Goiás, in the state of Goiás. This protection, begun in the 1950s, occurred in a conceptually and technically fragile way, led to a series of problems and challenges in the fields of history and archeology, especially in the preservation of this same national patrimony. The eighteenth-century mining town went through innumerable “gold bullfights” followed by mining abandonment and population decline (every time the metal fountains were exhausted). This process, initiated in the colonial period and still in progress, favored the construction of a series of memories that complicate the more objective interpretation of the profile of this colonial village. In the present work we seek to understand these processes and how the scientific researches - and even the policies for the patrimony - were informed in the memory, creating a somewhat confusing scenario regarding the colonial past of Pilar de Goiás. The historiography, we propose an interpretation about Pilar de Goiás based on a very plastic society, plural and multifaceted economy. This procedure, far from the grandiose and excessively grounded interpretations of the search for what would be a “mining society”, helps us to understand the processes involved in colonial occupation and the construction of networks of commerce, transit, and urbanization of the central portion of the Colony.