Aché

The Aché, once called Guayakí by their Guaraní-speaking neighbours, are nomadic hunter-gatherers of eastern Paraguay's forests. Stone axes like theirs have been dated to some nine thousand years ago.

Around 500 CE the arrival of Guaraní horticulturists, who raided and pushed them from the rivers into wooded hills, may have fixed their foraging way of life: small bands living on palm pith, roots and game, the thunder spirit Berendy at the centre of their beliefs. Their language pairs a Tupí-Guaraní vocabulary with a grammar unlike its sister tongues.

The earliest Jesuit archives name them Caaygua around 1620, and in the 1630s bands seized near the Acaray River mouth were forcibly settled in a Guaraní mission, where all died of disease within months. They eluded later settlement attempts. After the Jesuit expulsion of 1768 they kept to a forest life beyond colonial observation.