Léo Ramos Chaves / Pesquisa FAPESPResearcher died at age 92 and was buried in the backyard of her home in São Raimundo Nonato, PiauíLéo Ramos Chaves / Pesquisa FAPESP
“When the museum is inaugurated, I’m leaving. I’m going back to France, but I don’t know where. I like small, beautiful cities. I deserve a rest. I will claim my right to do nothing. I started working when I was 18.” These are the words of archaeologist Niède Guidon, from an interview with Pesquisa FAPESP published in October 2018. The São Paulo–born researcher was referring to the Museum of Nature, which was opened at the end of 2018, as planned, in Serra da Capivara National Park, southeastern Piauí. But the dream of a peaceful retirement in a quiet corner of Europe, an idea that friends said was mostly just a fantasy, never became reality.
Even with her health failing in recent years, Guidon chose not to leave rural Piauí for France, where she did part of her academic training and lived for two decades. On June 4, at the age of 92, she died of a heart attack at her home in São Raimundo Nonato. She was buried in the backyard of her house, which is located next to the headquarters of the Museum of the American Man Foundation (FUMDHAM). The foundation was founded in 1986 to help with management and preservation work at the national park, an area of almost 130,000 hectares created in 1979 that is home to fauna and flora typical of the Caatinga (a semiarid scrubland biome) and the semiarid climate of Brazil’s Northeast region. With more than 1,200 archaeological sites rich in cave paintings, the park was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1991. It has become a site for scientific research, nature preservation, education on the region’s culture, and given its beauty and abundance of rock art, a tourist attraction.
“Niède was a fundamental figure in Brazilian archaeology. She dedicated her life to research, excellence in teaching, improving heritage policies in Brazil, challenging paradigms, and boldly confronting conventions,” says Adriana Schmidt Dias, an archaeologist from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS). “Her research projects in Piauí opened up new pathways for the archaeology of global settlement.”
The daughter of a Brazilian mother and a French father, Guidon was born in Jaú, in the interior of São Paulo State. She earned a degree in natural history—an old course that combined biology and geology—from the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1959. She spent a brief period as a professor at the São Paulo State Department of Education and did a graduate course in prehistoric archaeology at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, France, in 1961 and 1962. Soon after, she joined the Paulista Museum, which was incorporated into USP in 1963.
Her aim was to forge a career in Brazil, where archaeology was still in its infancy. But after the military coup of 1964, she had to change plans. Taking advantage of her dual citizenship and contacts in Paris, she promptly immigrated to France. Despite not having been active in left-wing groups, Guidon was reported by a military officer in Brazil for alleged subversive activities. “I had to leave the country quickly,” she recalled in a 2013 interview she gave after winning the Conrado Wessel Prize in the Culture category. “I even left my furnished apartment in São Paulo.”
In France, she pursued an academic career. She worked with the archaeologist and ethnologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986), who created the prehistory discipline at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris, in 1962. In 1975, she obtained her PhD, also from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. It was around this time that the archaeologist had her first contact with the cave paintings of the Serra da Capivara mountains, which would take her life and research in a new direction. In 1973, as a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, Guidon participated in the first Franco-Brazilian mission searching for the oldest evidence of humans in the Americas. She worked as an assistant to French archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire (1917–1977).
Léo Ramos Chaves / Pesquisa FAPESPRock art at one of the archaeological sites in Serra da CapivaraLéo Ramos Chaves / Pesquisa FAPESP
Piauí was not on the itinerary for Laming-Emperaire, whose attention in Brazil was focused on the mining region of Lagoa Santa, located on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, where there were several important archaeological sites. Since Guidon had no interest in trying to discover the oldest man in the Americas, she made an offer to the research leader. She would organize the expedition to Lagoa Santa as long as she was allowed to go to Serra da Capivara to see the rock art of the semiarid Northeast. The deal was accepted and on her first trip to São Raimundo Nonato, Guidon found 55 sites with prehistoric paintings.
The abundance of her discoveries led her to invest more time and work in the region. Still working in France, she began excavating in Serra da Capivara during her vacations. She began visiting more frequently and for longer when the national park was opened and FUMDHAM was established. In 1993, she moved to the area permanently. She was head of the foundation until 2019, when she became president emeritus.
In more than half a century of valiant effort in Serra da Capivara, fighting against a chronic lack of funding and even physical threats from people who believed her to be interfering in the region, Guidon, to use a cliché, put the Piauí sites on the map of Brazilian and American archaeology. No one disputes the unique importance of her work in maintaining and promoting the park, its archaeological and paleontological sites, and the culture of the region and those who live there.
“In addition to doing preservation work at the park, FUMDHAM established two museums in the region [the Museum of Nature and the Museum of the American Man, founded first], promoted research, and encouraged the Federal University of Vale do São Francisco to establish undergraduate and postgraduate courses in archaeology in São Raimundo Nonato,” highlights archaeologist Eduardo Góes Neves, director of USP’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology (MAE). “Niède also always tried to raise interest in archaeology among a wider audience, even encouraging tourism in the region, something not all researchers do.”
Some of Guidon’s scientific work was (and still is) the subject of controversy among her peers. In several articles published throughout her career, she dated the arrival of modern humans to the São Raimundo Nonato region at 50,000 to 100,000 years ago. “Subsequent work in Serra da Capivara has confirmed the existence of archaeological sites over 20,000 years old, but whether there were even earlier human occupations remains an open question,” says Góes Neves.
The oldest human bones found in Serra da Capivara were dated at around 10,000 years old. The evidence cited by Guidon and her colleagues in favor of the hypothesis that humans first occupied the continent much longer ago is indirect and less incisive, such as fires, paintings, and chipped stone tools that could only have been made by skilled hands. Debate is part of science. Thanks to the maintenance of the archaeological sites in rural Piauí, the archaeologist’s ideas can be confirmed or refuted by future studies that will make use of the rich material provided by the region.
The above interview was published with the title “The guardian of semiarid Brazil” in issue 353 of July/2025.
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