Chicham

The Chicham peoples live at the headwaters of the Marañón River and its tributaries, in northern Peru and eastern Ecuador. Among them are the Shuar, whose name means ‘people’. They lived by gardening and by hunting with blowguns and darts tipped with curare, and held to complex spiritual beliefs about souls and the power called arutam. Headhunting raids were part of their culture.

In the 1500s their warriors halted the expansion of the Inca Empire into the Amazon basin. They also destroyed settlements of the Spanish conquistadors.