Tapajo

The Tapajó are the Tupi-speaking people of the lower Tapajós River at its confluence with the Amazon. Their ancestors built the Santarém or Tapajônica archaeological culture from roughly the tenth century: dense riverside settlements under hereditary chiefs, famous for elaborate modelled ceramics and caryatid vases.

When Francisco de Orellana's Spanish flotilla passed the river mouth in 1542, canoe squadrons led by the chief Chipayo attacked it, and in 1626 Pedro Teixeira found the village of Tupuliçus there, home to Tapajó and Urucucu groups.

In the 1600s the Tapajó chiefdom controlled a long stretch of the Amazon bank, but the Jesuit mission founded in 1661 grew into the town of Santarém, drawing its people into mission life, labour service and epidemic decline, until they were absorbed into colonial riverine society in the 1700s.