Kuikuro

The Kuikuro of the upper Xingu in Mato Grosso are the living heirs of Kuhikugu, the garden cities archaeologists map at the river's headwaters. Their Cariban language links them to the Xinguano cultural world of circular plaza villages, where chiefs, wrestlers and shamans order life by fishing, manioc and pequi seasons. The Kuhikugu settlements ran from about 1,500 years ago to 400 years ago: ditched enclosures, causeways and dark-earth fields feeding thousands, a quiet urbanism without stone. European diseases, arriving by trade long before Europeans, thinned the towns; Fawcett's Lost City of Z hunted their memory in the 1920s. Some 600 Kuikuro live today in the Xingu Indigenous Park, up from 450 in 2002, wrestling in the Kuarup funeral rites that still gather the whole upper Xingu. Other Xingu tribes share the fishing calendar and the village rituals, and the 2010 count marked recovery from the trade-borne epidemics. Kuhikugu stories still draw explorers hunting the lost city.