Itonama

The Itonama lived along the river that bears their name, in the Moxos lowlands of the Bolivian Amazon. Jesuit records begin to describe their communities in detail in the early eighteenth century. During his journey in 1704, Lorenzo Legarda reported twenty-three villages between San Pedro and the Baure country, principally along the Itonama River, with some six thousand inhabitants by his reckoning. Santa María Magdalena, established as a mission around 1720, became an important centre for the Itonama. Mission settlement subsequently reorganized a landscape in which Itonama communities were already living.