Xavante Cultural Landscapes, Part I: Oral History of Resource Management at a Regional Scale

According to elders from the Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Reserve, the Xavante people first settled at the base of Wedezé Mountain after migrating to the Mortes River region in eastern Mato Grosso, Brazil. Occupied and utilized continuously from the mid-1800s to the present, this site contains important archaeological remains and displays remarkable evidence of semicircular anthropogenic forests. In this paper, we present evidence from Xavante oral history in order to argue that indigenous resource management served to accentuate ecological contrasts between diverse vegetation types in the Wedezé region, including areas outside the principal village sites. After outlining the chronology of occupation at Wedezé, we describe what Xavante oral history says about the establishment and maintenance of highly cultural village spaces, the modification of gallery forests and their soils though slash-and-burn cultivation, repetitive resource utilization along trekking routes, and the promotion of vegetative productivity through collective hunting with fire.