Cultural and linguistic affinities of the foraging peoples of northern Amazonia: a new perspective

In pre-Colonial t imes, the region of the Orinoco/Rio Negro watershed was an important link in the trade network that extended from the Ucayali to the Orinoco Delta and, as such, it provided the channel for many cultural as well as economic exchanges. But after the eighteenth century, the formal establishment of an international boundary between the Hispanoand lusophone colonies, coupled with the dislocation or destruction of many Upper Orinoco indigenous communities by slave-trading, missionization and a variety of extractive fronts, had the effect of breaking the chain of contacts. Indigenous groups on both sides of the frontier were induced to turn their attention downstream, towards local colonial entrepots, to the relative neglect of their former trade partners on the other side of the watershed (Hill & Wright 1988:84-85, Dreyfus 1992:84-87). This rupturing of the link between the Rio Negro and the Orinoco has also been reflected to a certain degree in anthropological studies of the region since the many connections between the indigenous peoples of the two river basins are often overlooked (Henley 1990:191). A case in point concerns the foraging groups of the two river basins, i.e. those