Tonokote

The Tonokote, or Tonocoté, also called Zurita, were a sedentary farming people of the south-central plains of Santiago del Estero in northern Argentina, with lands also reaching into Tucumán. Their villages were enclosed by palisades, and round thatched houses stood on artificial mounds above the floodplain.

They used the annual floods of the Dulce and Salado rivers to water fields of corn, quinoa, beans and squash, kept llamas and rheas, and gathered carob and cactus fruit; potters built large funerary urns and weavers worked the loom. Around 1480 the Inca advance into the region incorporated some of their communities.

The Spaniards first knew them as Juríes, from a Quechua word for rhea, and the name Tonocoté appears in documents only from 1574. Their own language was scarcely recorded before Quechua and then Spanish displaced it.