Kukuro Kalapalo

The upper Xingu is home to the Kuikuro and Kalapalo, peoples whose related languages belong to the Karib family. Their villages form part of a wider society linked by marriage, exchange and ceremony across the rivers of central Brazil. Manioc gardens and fishing support settlements arranged around open central plazas. Archaeology reveals networks of planned villages in Kuikuro country between about 1200 and 1700. Large centres and smaller communities were joined by roads, their arrangement reflecting a regional order that changed over time. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, the ancestors of the Kuikuro and Kalapalo had become distinct groups within the upper Xingu's Karib-speaking population.