In the nineteenth century, the Paraíba do Sul Valley received the coffee enterprise, a profound transformer of the region s landscapes, which in less than one hundred years has faded from the landscape. By exploring the usually neglected agencies, new possibilities for analyses of the historical ecology of these areas emerge. Approaches that consider multispecies relationships can reveal social-ecological interactions hidden by historiography and (re)tell the story of the landscape. Thus, the general objective of this thesis was to understand the distribution of African grasses and their associated social-ecological legacies in the current landscape of the valley from a broad temporal perspective. To this end, iconographic and textual documentary surveys in historical collections were used in conjunction with landscape observation in fieldwork to acquire vegetational and soil compaction data. Relations between Black people and the practice of cattle-raising on plantation properties were observed, as well as varied uses for grasses of African origin in the historical records. The economic activity of tropeirismo - the commercial trade made by free man in association with mules - produced a meaningful change in difficult access areas in the Serra da Bocaina, regional name for the larger Serra do Mar, indicating the dependence on pastures distributed by trade routes for their effect. Today, the apparent density of pastures and sites that were pastureland at least 30 years ago show the heterogeneity of environments in which ranching occurs or occurred, indicating multiple trajectories for land uses from grazing. We conclude that human and non-human agencies bring perspectives that can assist in explaining the current landscape of the region.