Complex of some twenty interconnected pre-Columbian towns and villages ('garden cities') at the headwaters of the Xingu River in the southern Amazon, featuring planned settlements, defensive ditches and palisades, causeways, plazas, and large-scale anthropogenic terra preta soils; likely home to tens of thousands of people before near-total collapse from introduced disease following European contact. The Kuikuro people of the modern Xingu peoples are considered likely descendants.
The garden-city network collapsed with post-contact epidemics; the upper-Xingu peoples (Kuikuro among them) are its living heirs.