Xingu

Population

The task of obtaining a population total of the Park for all the ethnic groups in one year was recently made possible, thanks to the work developed by the Unifesp (Federal University of São Paulo) in the area of health, through an agreement with the  Funasa (National Health Foundation). In the past, the censuses or population estimates were made on the basis of researchers’ itineraries. Given these limitations, in order to get an idea of the demographic evolution of the Upper Xingu, the table below was prepared, which is divided into three columns (the first two being based on the research by Pedro Agostinho, 1972). The first sets of data go back to the end of the XIXth Century and are found in the texts by Karl von den Steinen, but they refer to only a few people. The numbers marked by asterisks indicate that they were obtained by estimated calculation, supposing that the villages had the same number of houses and residents per house.

The second column corresponds to estimates by different researchers who were in the region in the middle of the XXth Century. For the year 1954, when a measles epidemic devastated the region, the data indicate the initial population, the number of deaths which occurred in that year and the surviving population. The following column presents the data of 2002 (based on the Unifesp survey), which demonstrate a significant demographic recovery.

For the ethnic groups who lived more to the north of the Park, the following are population data from 2002 (also based on the Unifesp survey):