We went among some islands which we thought uninhabited, but after we got to be in among them, so numerous were the settlements which came into sight … that we grieved … and, when they saw us, there came out to meet us on the river over two hundred pirogues [canoes], that each one carries twenty or thirty Indians and some forty … they were colorfully decorated with various emblems, and they had with them many trumpets and drums … and on land a marvelous thing to see were the squadron formations that were in the villages, all playing instruments and dancing about, manifesting great joy upon seeing that we were passing beyond their villages.
These people exist in such vast quantity, that it is not possible to count their settlements or villages, [and] many times in one day’s march one passes ten or twelve villages, and in each one of them there are ten to thirty houses, and in these houses there are some that are thirty to forty paces across … even their roads they make very straight and wide, and they keep them so clean that one finds not even a fallen leaf….
Nevertheless, signs of something more elaborate than present-day settlements were all around. Robert Carneiro of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, who lived with the Kuikuro in the 1950s, had suggested that their settled way of life and productive agricultural and fishing economy could support communities 1,000 to 2,000 strong—several times the contemporary population of a few hundred. He also cited evidence that indeed it once had: a prehistoric site (designated “X11” in our archaeological survey) that was surrounded by extensive ditches. The Villas Boas brothers—Brazilian indigenistas who were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for their part in creating the Xingu park—had reported such earthworks near many villages.
In January 1993, soon after I arrived in the Kuikuro village, the principal hereditary chief, Afukaka, took me to one of the ditches at a site (X6) they call Nokugu, named for the jaguar spirit being thought to live there. We passed local men who were raising a huge fish weir across the Angahuku River, which was already swelling from the seasonal rains. The ditch, which runs over two kilometers, was two to three meters deep and more than 10 meters wide. Even though I had expected to find an archaeological landscape different from today’s, the scale of these ancient communities and their constructions surprised me. Kuikuro research assistants and I spent the following months mapping it and other earthworks at the 45-hectare site.
Since that time, our team has studied numerous other sites in the area, hacking more than 30 kilometers of line-of-sight transects through the forest to map, examine and excavate the sites. Many Kuikuro helped in one way or another, and some became well versed in archaeology.
At the end of 1993, Afukaka and I went back to Nokugu so I could tell him what I had learned. We followed the contour of the site’s outer ditch and stopped at an earthen bridge, where a major road we had uncovered passed over it. I pointed down the arrow-straight ancient dirt road, which was 10 to 20 meters wide and led to another ancient site, Heulugihïtï (X13), about five kilometers away. We crossed the bridge and entered Nokugu.
The road, defined by low earthen curbs, widened to 40 meters—the size of a modern four-lane highway. After a couple of hundred meters, we passed over the inner ditch and stopped to look at our recently finished excavation trench, where we had found a funnel-shaped footing for a tree-trunk palisade. Afukaka told me a story of palisaded villages and raids in his people’s distant past.
As we moved farther into the ancient town, we passed through patches of forest, scrub and open areas that now cover the site—the footprints of diverse past activities. We emerged into a grassy glade of towering palms marking the former plaza. I slowly spun and pointed along the perfectly circular edge of the plaza, marked by a meter-high mound. The tall palms, I told him, had colonized the plaza centuries ago from compost gardens in domestic areas.
Leaving the plaza to explore the surrounding neighborhoods, we came across large refuse middens that closely resembled the one behind Afukaka’s own house. They were filled with broken pots that he noted were exactly like those his wives used to process and cook manioc, down to minute details. On a later visit, when we were excavating a pre-Columbian house, the chief bent down in the central kitchen area, popped out a big hunk of pottery, and corroborated my sense that the daily life of the ancient society was much like today’s. “You’re right!” Afukaka exclaimed. “Look here, a pot support”—an undagi, as the Kuikuro call it, used to cook manioc.
From House to Polity “Palatial” is not the word that usually comes to mind to describe a pole-and-thatch house. Most Westerners think “hut.” But the house that the Kuikuro were building for the chief when I arrived in 1993 was massive: well over 1,000 square meters. It is hard to imagine that a house built like a giant, overturned basket without stone, mortar or nails could get any bigger. Even the average Xinguano house, at 250 square meters, is as big as the average American home.
What makes the chief’s house stand out is not just size but also its position, located on the southern point of the central circular plaza. As one enters the village along the formal entry road, high-ranking families live to the right (south) and left (north). The arrangement reproduces, on a larger scale, the layout of an individual house, whose highest-ranking occupant hangs his hammock to the right, along the long axis of the house. The entry road runs approximately east-west; in the chief’s house, his hammock is oriented in the same direction. When a chief dies, he is also laid to rest in a hammock with his head to the west.
This basic corporeal calculus applies on all scales, from houses to the entire Upper Xingu basin. Ancient towns are distributed across the region and interconnected by a lattice of precisely aligned roads. When I first arrived in the area, it took weeks to map the ditches, plazas and roads using standard archaeological techniques. Beginning in 2002, we began using precise GPS, enabling us to map major earthworks in a matter of days. What we have found is an impressive degree of regional integration. The landscape planning seems almost overdetermined, with a specific place for everything. Yet it was based on the same basic principles of the current village. Main roads run east-west, secondary roads radiate out to the north and south, and smaller roads proliferate in other directions.
We mapped two hierarchical clusters of towns and villages in our study area. Each consists of a major ceremonial center and several large satellite towns in precise orientations relative to the center. These towns likely held 1,000 or more inhabitants. Smaller villages are located farther from the center. The northern cluster is centered on X13, which is not a town so much as a ritual center, rather like a fairground. Two large walled settlements lie equidistant to the north and south of X13, and two medium-size walled towns lie equidistant to the northeast and southwest. The southern cluster is slightly different. It is centered on X11, which is both a ritual center and a town, around which are medium- and small-size plaza settlements.
In land area, each cluster was more than 250 square kilometers, of which about a fifth was the built-up core area, making it roughly equivalent in size to a small modern city. Today most of the ancient landscape is overgrown, but forests in the core areas have distinctive concentrations of certain plants, animals, soils and archaeological artifacts, such as prolific ceramics. Land use was more intensive in the past, but the remains suggest that many practices were similar to those of the Kuikuro: manioc plots, small orchards of pequi fruit trees and fields of sapé grass, the preferred material for house thatch. The countryside was a patchy landscape interspersed with secondary forests that invaded fallow agricultural areas. Wetlands, which today are choked with Buriti palm, the most important industrial crop, preserve diverse evidence of fish farming, such as artificial ponds, raised causeways and weir footings. Outside the core areas was a more lightly populated green belt and even deeper forest wilderness between clusters. This forest, too, had its uses for animals, medicinal plants and certain trees, and it was considered the home of diverse forest spirits.
Identification of large walled settlements over an area about the size of Vermont suggests that at least 15 clusters were spread across the Upper Xingu. But most of the region is unstudied, so the true number could have been much higher. Radiocarbon dating of our excavated sites suggests that ancestors of the Xinguanos settled the area, most likely from the west, and began to mold the forests and wetlands to their design about 1,500 years ago or before. In the centuries before Europeans first discovered the Americas, the communities were re-formed into hierarchical clusters. Records date back only to 1884, so the settlement patterns are our only way of estimating the pre-Columbian population; the scale of the clusters suggests a regional population many times larger than today, perhaps numbering 30,000 to 50,000.
