A plurilingual world of plaza villages — Carib Kuikuro, Arawak Wauja, Tupi Kamayurá and their kin — ringed by moats and causeways, trading pottery, salt and shell across one shared ceremonial culture.
Heir to pre-Columbian "garden cities" of perhaps 50,000, the survivors fused into a single multiethnic order; first reached in peace by von den Steinen in 1884, gutted to under a thousand by 20th-century epidemics, they found refuge from 1961 in the Xingu Indigenous Park.
The atlas holds 2 border frames for Upper Xingu peoples — the shape you scrub through changes in 1250 · 1885.
Heckenberger's archaeology of the Upper Xingu 'garden cities' and the plurilingual order that survived them.
An accessible survey of the pre- and post-contact Americas that conveys the pre-conquest complexity and colonial devastation of Amazonian and Brazilian indigenous peoples.