The Upper Xingu region was a highly self-organized
pre-Columbian anthropogenic landscape, including deposits of fertile agricultural
terra preta, black soil in Portuguese, with a network of roads and polities each of which covered about 250 square kilometers. The Upper Xingu region was heavily populated prior to European and African contact. Densely populated settlements developed from 1200 to 1600 CE. Ancient roads and bridges linked communities that were often surrounded by ditches or moats. The villages were pre-planned and featured circular plazas. Archaeologists have unearthed 19 villages so far. The upper Xingu was one of the last parts of Brazil to be reached by Europeans. From the north it was protected by the Xingu's many rapids. From the south it was protected by thin settlement and the warlike
Bororo and
Xavante, among others. In 1884
Karl von den Steinen headed northwest from
Cuiabá to some Christianized
Bakairi on the upper
Teles Pires. They led him two weeks east to the Batavi River where they built canoes. They went downstream and met some uncontacted Bakairi, as well as the Trumai and Suya. In the next 20 years other explorers entered the area, several of whom died.
Percy Fawcett disappeared there in 1925. with a man from the
Ikpeng tribe in Xingu Indigenous Park, 1967 The national park was created after a campaign by the
Villas-Bôas brothers for the protection of the region. An account of the exploration of this area by the Villas-Bôas brothers and their efforts to protect the region is documented in the film
Xingu (2011) and in the book by John Hemming,
People of the Rainforest: The Villas Boas Brothers, Explorers and Humanitarians of the Amazon (London, 2019). The Villas-Bôas brothers and three anthropologists and activists had the radical idea of creating a vast area of forest protected solely for its indigenous inhabitants and invited scientists. This was put to the vice president of Brazil in 1952, at which a much larger park was proposed. However, the proposal was opposed by the state of Mato Grosso which began granting land within the proposed area to colonizing companies. Nine years of bitter political and media struggle ensued, until a new president of Brazil, Jânio Quadros (a family friend of the Villas-Bôas) rammed it through as a presidential decree, but at a greatly reduced area to satisfy the state government. The park came into existence by decree 50.455 of 14 April 1961. (Adjustments were made on 31 July 1961, 6 August 1968 and 13 July 1971. The final demarcation of the perimeter was made in 1978.) The area was soon given the designation of "Indigenous Park" to cover the dual purpose of protecting the environment and the indigenous people, with all others excluded. It was the first such vast protected area in the world, and was the prototype of large indigenous territories throughout Amazonia which now protect a significant proportion of surviving tropical rain forests. The Xingu Indigenous Park was initially a presidential department, but is now subject to both the indigenous agency Funai and the environmental agency Ibama. By the late 1990s livestock and soya farms to the northeast of the park were starting to reach the park, as was deforestation to the west of the park. The effects of human activity outside the park were starting to pollute the waters of the park. The park remains an island of forest and rivers increasingly threatened by polluting activity and deforestation outside its perimeter. ==Peoples==