Within the Amazonian Craton, Archean crust is restricted to the Carajás granite-greenstone terrain. The younger Maroni-Itacaiunas province, including supra-crustal sequences and associated calc-alkaline granitoids, is linked with the Birimian system in West Africa, making up a large Paleoproterozoic cratonic nucleus. Beginning at ca. 2.0 Ga, accretionary belts formed along the southwestern margin of this nucleus, giving rise to the Ventuari-Tapajós (2000–1800 Ma), Rio Negro–Juruena (1780–1550 Ma), and Rondonian–San Ignacio (1500–1300 Ma) tectonic provinces. Continued soft-collision/accretion processes driven by subduction produced a very large “basement” in which granitoid rocks predominate, many of them with juvenile-like Nd isotopic signatures. Felsic volcanics are also widespread; however, there is no evidence of Archean basement inliers, and regions with high-grade metamorphics are restricted. The Sunsas-Aguapeí (1250–1000 Ma) orogenic belt, at the southwestern end of the craton, was originated in an extensional environment, later deformed during the Grenvillian collision between Amazonia and Laurentia. Over the cratonic area, a widespread anorogenic granitic magmatism (1000–970 Ma) is a reflection of this orogeny over the stable foreland. After the termination of the Sunsas orogeny, continental fragmentation affected the eastern margin of the Amazonian Craton. The intra-oceanic Goiás magmatic arc, closely associated with the Transbrasiliano megasuture, is the evidence of a large oceanic domain that started its consumption between 900 and 800 Ma, giving rise to juvenile material represented by calc-alkaline orthogneisses. Later, these units were deformed during the Brasiliano orogeny (700–500 Ma), in the process of amalgamation of Gondwana.

Precambrian terranes and units of the Dahomeyan (now Beninian belt) from Togo, Benin, and southwest Nigeria are described and compared with those from the northernmost part of the Brasiliano belt. The major phases of deformation and metamorphism occurred about 600 Ma in both continents. Foreland nappes derived from passive margin sedimentary beds of the West African craton display high-pressure metamorphism. Parautochthons include slices of an ophiolitic-type assemblage. The suture zone metabasic rocks are only recorded in the Beninian belt. They may represent the granulitized and eclogitized mafic root of ensimatic arc terranes, and have no equivalent in northeast Brazil. The Nigerian Province includes to the west a narrow elongated belt of high-pressure granulites, also found in the northernmost part of the Borborema Province of northeast Brazil. Two main lithostratigraphic units can be recognized in both provinces: (1) gray gneisses that derive from Archean plutonic rocks, thoroughly deformed, recrystallized, and remobilized during the Pan-African–Brasiliano thermo-tectonic events; and (2) Proterozoic monocyclic units displaying the same petrostructural evolution as reworked Archean, and in which we tentatively recognize a Lower Proterozoic group consisting of aluminous metaquartzites and pelitic schists, which were intruded by 2(?) to 1.8 Ga anorogenic granites, and a younger disconformable flysch-type unit of assumed Late Proterozoic age. Large-scale horizontal movements responsible for a flat-lying foliation and nappes affected several domains of the Nigerian and Borborema Provinces, whereas steep structures formed penecontemporaneously along synmetamorphic shear zones. Second-order late-metamorphic steep shear zones are considered as trans-continental lithospheric fractures that overprinted collisional structures. Among these, the 4°50′ Kandi fault and the Sobral fault represent a particularly good correlation of northeast Brazil and southwest Nigeria-Benin, and are used to propose a rigorous Precambrian fit across the south Atlantic Ocean.