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Environment, cultural identity, ethnolinguistics. These are this book subjects. By studying denominative place the author develops a deep and sensible research related to space modified by the construction of five-reservoirs to supply water to SÆo Paulo Metropolitan Region. This work intensely investigates a fundamental subject for inhabitants of metropolis in modernity: the seeking for water. This research focus is the Tietê River, supplier of all water to complex system known as Alto Tietê Producing System. Knowing this river history is extremely important to understand the growth of the biggest metropolis of Brazil. In all studies developing in her expertise, the author amalgamates human history, linguistics and environment in order to present Brazilian universe when Europeans have arrived, their first contacts with natives, and the proper appropriation of names and point of views from the aboriginals to interpret spaces Europeans started to know, whose significant geographic denominative marks mainly configured in river names from Tupi languages, presents nomenclature from 16th century or even before, highlighting important traces of Brazilian culture.

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The author is MSc in Semiotics and Linguistics and PhD student at Universidade de SÆo Paulo, analyzing place name in aboriginal languages from 16th and 17th centuries to study ethno-cultural traces of already extinct communities that lived over Tietê and Paraiba Rivers. She works with Education in Linguistics and participates at ATESP Project.

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