Voyages dans l'Amérique Méridionale, Volume 2

"A Spanish military official and naturalist, [Félix de] Azara spent the 1780s and 1790s demarcating the contested border between Spanish and Portuguese claims in the Río de la Plata basin (modern-day Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay). The five-volume Voyages dans l'Amérique méridionale documents the peoples and fauna of the region and includes over two dozen fold-out maps and engravings. Published in Paris in 1809, this French first edition was translated from an earlier (but no longer extant) Spanish edition [(first published in Spanish in Madrid between 1802 and 1805)]. Among its many admirers were naturalists Alcide D'Orbigny and Charles Darwin.... While Voyages dans l'Amérique méridionale is best known for its careful descriptions and plates of the birds and animals of the Río de la Plata basin (aimed at rebutting [the Histoire Naturelle by] the French naturalist [George-Louis Leclerc] the Comte de Buffon), Azara also provided significant descriptions of the region's Indigenous groups (notably the Charrúa, the Minuane, and the Guaraní). Written during a period of considerable societal flux following the expulsion of the Jesuit order and the abandonment of the famous mission system, such descriptions provide vital insights for archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists connecting the deep histories of the South American lowlands with the ethnographic present."--