Cultural Borders: impacts and contacts in the discovery and colonization of Brazil

Abstract

This paper analyses how the complex process of cultural transformation in Atlantic America occurred after the Iberian conquest, colonization and contacts between the Iberian society and American Indian groups. The culture of the dominate Iberian society conquered the local Indian culture, but received important influentes from it, leading to an Indian-Iberian cultural synthesis. Those cultural contacts are now related to the new American colonial society, very different from the original one.