Enduring Traditions of Indigenous Mound Building along the Upper Paraguai River (Mato Grosso, Brazil)

This article presents the results of participatory research on Indigenous mound building technology in the Pantanal region of South America. In the Pantanal, the Guató people maintain a long-standing tradition of constructing aterros (earthworks) used as foundations for houses, agricultural fields, and burials. In July 2025, under the direction of Guató leader Lourenço Pereira Leite, we built a new section of the Caminho do Peixe mound along the Paraguai River in Mato Grosso, Brazil. During the construction we recorded volumetric data, oral histories, and documented the resulting mound with drone-mounted LiDAR. These data allow us to estimate the work hours required to build archaeological earth mounds in the region and to examine the social and cultural dimensions of Guató mound building. We argue that the complexity of this 5000-year-old tradition has been underestimated in archaeology and must be fully recognized to understand the deep Indigenous history of the Pantanal.