Kambeba

The Kambeba, also called Omágua, occupied populous settlements along the upper Amazon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. One grouping lived on the upper Napo; another, known as the Island Omágua, extended upriver from the vicinity of present-day Fonte Boa towards Peru. Travellers remarked on village leadership and cotton clothing. In 1647 Laureano de la Cruz described men's painted sleeveless tunics and women's cotton wraps.

The missionary Samuel Fritz worked among the Kambeba between 1686 and 1723, leaving a diary and map. Colonial observers also recorded deliberate shaping of infants' heads, a practice Kambeba informants later associated with distinguishing themselves from peoples accused of cannibalism and vulnerable to enslavement. By 1787, an expedition artist portrayed one of the few people said still to retain that form. These accounts preserve fragments of a river society under growing colonial pressure.