Pericu

The Pericu were the Indians of the Cape Region, the southern tip of Baja California Sur, holding the coast from Todos Santos to La Paz and islands in the Gulf. Isolated by desert and sea, they kept the atlatl and dart alongside the bow and arrow into the seventeenth century, and buried their dead in caves as red-ochre-painted secondary bundles, the Las Palmas burial complex. Their language was never properly recorded.

Spanish contact began in the 1530s, when the mutineer Fortun Ximenez reached La Paz and Hernan Cortes followed with his own expedition. Jesuit missions came later, including La Paz in 1720.

The Pericu Revolt of 1734 killed two missionaries and shook Spanish rule for two years, but war and Old World diseases broke the people, and by the Jesuit expulsion of 1768 their culture had vanished.