Ever since the Portuguese invaded Brazil, vegetation has intrigued them. Since then, several naturalists, almost always white men, have set out to try to understand Brazilian phytogeography. It has always caught their attention when forests occur isolated in the middle of rural formations, as in the case of Capões de Mata, which appears in the drainage lines of the rivers that cut through the Cerrado in Brazil’s most charming tropical mountain range. I, a woman of indigenous and African descent, was also enchanted by naturalism and these forest islands, almost always associated with organic soils from ecosystems called peatlands. I have been researching these landscapes’ paleoenvironmental reconstructions for some years to understand their formation better. The forest is part of our history and leaves us with many traces of time. Among them are fragments of charcoal from trees that once lived there. This project hypothesizes that by analyzing microcoals extracted from the soil accumulated over thousands of years, we can uncover the forest’s past and, perhaps, a little more about human occupation in the Americas.