The Museu João Fona, housed in a nineteenth-century building on the Praça Barão do Rio Branco, is the main cultural museum of Santarém. It covers the archaeology of the Tapajós region — including the striking Santarém ceramic tradition produced by the Tapajó people, whose geometric and figurative pottery ranked among the finest in pre-Columbian Amazonia — alongside natural history exhibits and material from the Amazonian rubber boom era.
The ceramics collection is the reason to come. The Tapajó style, which flourished between roughly 1000 and 1600 CE, featured complex zoomorphic figures and intricate red-on-white painted surfaces. Many of the best pieces ended up in museums in Belém and Europe during the colonial era, but the museum has a solid representative collection.