In the eighteenth century, Portuguese settlers and African slaves came from wooden ships from Mazagão-Morocco, North Africa, to the Amazon, settling on the banks of the Mutuacá-Amapá river, where the village of Nova Mazagão was founded – Nowadays Mazagão Velho village. Archaeological surveys around the village of Mazagão Velho, discovered the presence of ruins of a church of stones, dating to the foundation of the village of Nova Mazagão. In this sense, the discovery constitutes in the few vestiges of the first historical constructions of the occupation of New Mazagan. Thus, the objective of this study consisted in the mineralogical characterization of constructive material, ceramic bricks and mortar used in the construction of the old church. The mineralogical composition was determined by X-ray diffraction measurements, with the help of the database of inorganic compounds and minerals PDF2 of the International Center of Diffraction Data contained in the X'PertHighScore Plus program. The results obtained by the diffractograms revealed the mineral phases of quartz, kaolinite, calcite, ilite, rutile and hematite. The mineral quartz, whose diffraction peaks are the most intense, was present in all the samples, in agreement with the expected, because it is the most abundant and resistant mineral in the tropical soils. Kaolinite and calcite were found only in church mortar, corroborating the fact that lime mortar in the Amazon is very common in colonial period constructions. The illite was observed only in the sample of the floor, while the rutile and the hematite were observed in the floor and brick samples, inferring the possibility of painting in these samples, due to the rutile being used as pigments.
Isolation and characterization of actinomycetes from Brazilian tropical soils