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It is likely that this area once supported one of the highest populations in the Americas before Europeans arrived, with towns and villages stretching for miles along the riverbanks, living off the rich stocks of fish in the river, and farming corn on even richer alluvial soils, replenished annually when the Amazon flooded. On all the distinctive flat-topped hills around Santarém, there is evidence of prehistoric Indian occupation , easily identified by the terra preta do Indio (Indian black soil), a black compost deliberately built up over the generations by Indian farmers. If you do any walking up and down these hills, especially around Belterra, keep your eyes open for ceramic shards. In recent years, thanks to the work of an American archeologist, Anna Roosevelt, it has become clear that Santarém and its surrounding area is one of the most important archeological sites in the Americas.

Thirty kilometres east of Santarém, more easily accessible by river than by road, is a nineteenth-century sugar plantation called Taperinha . In an excavation there in 1991, Roosevelt unearthed decorated pottery almost 10,000 years old - twice as old as the oldest ceramics found anywhere in the Americas. This suggests that the Amazon basin was settled before the Andes, and that the Americas had been settled much earlier than previously thought. Later excavations in Monte Alegre confirmed that the middle Amazon played an important role in the prehistory of the Americas with cave and rock paintings dotting the surrounding hills also being dated at around 10,000 years old. About two thousand years ago, Indian culture in the region entered a particularly dynamic phase, producing some superbly decorated ceramics comparable in their sophistication with Andean crafts; there are beautiful pieces of Santarém-phase pottery in the small museum in Santarém, and even more in the Museu Goeldi in Belém.

The very first European accounts of the middle Amazon, dating from the early sixteenth century, which talk of swarms of canoes coming out to do battle and of Indian long houses lining the riverbanks, are probably true. The river asssumed its current lightly populated look in the centuries after first contact, as disease and slavery wiped out the Indians or drove them way upriver; as late as 1960 some two hundred Indians were massacred by settlers on a sandbank just south of Itaituba