[1] The name Cambeba seems to have been applied by other neighboring tribes and refers to the Omagua custom of flattening their children's heads by binding a piece of wood to the forehead soon after birth.

In the 18th century, the Omaguas would point out to travelers that their flattened foreheads were a sign of cultural superiority over their neighbors, and for a long time they resisted abandoning this custom, even under missionary pressure.

[4] Amazonians may have used terra preta to make the land suitable for the large-scale agriculture needed to support dense populations and complex social formations such as chiefdoms.

Alexander von Humboldt referred to the supposed location of the mythical golden city, "El Dorado de las Omaguas", as being "between the sources of the Rio Negro, of the Uaupes (Guape), and of the Jupura or Caqueta.

While it is possible Orellana may have exaggerated the level of development among the Amazonians, their semi-nomadic descendants are distinguished by having a hereditary yet landless aristocracy, a historical anomaly for a society without a sedentary, agrarian culture.

They were a sedentary, civic-minded people who wore clothing and had an identifiable political authority; they also were involved in military conflicts with tribes from the interior, whose prisoners of war were incorporated into Cambeba society as domestic servants.

[16] Samuel Fritz and other missionaries began concentrating the scattered indigenous communities into Jesuit reductions in order to facilitate religious indoctrination and protect them from enslavement by the Portuguese, but smallpox devastated the population, leaving the region of the upper Solimões uninhabited.

[18] Throughout the eighteenth century and until slavery was officially outlawed in Brazil in 1888, forced labor programs destroyed indigenous communities, compelling the natives to abandon their ethnic traditions and adopt the identity of caboclos (settlers of mixed race).

In Brazil, Omaguas live in several villages on the middle and upper Solimões in Amazonas, in lands predominately occupied by the Ticunas, with smaller groups in Manaus.

The expedition spent almost a year with the Cambebas of the Aguarico River area, and by virtue of a bilingual Quechua-Cambeba translator, produced a number of ecclesiastical texts in Omagua, including a catechism.

He renamed them using the names of patron saints, constructed several rudimentary chapels and baptized mainly children because he found most adults to be insufficiently indoctrinated, as well as "reluctant to give up entirely certain heathen abuses."

The Omaguas told Fritz with remarkable candor that before becoming Christians, they had enjoyed a kind of polity and government; many of them living a sociable life, showing a satisfactory subjection and obedience to their principal caciques, and treating everyone, men and women alike, with a certain consideration.

[2] According to Fritz, when Omagua girls reached puberty, they would be hung up in hammocks "within an awning fixed to the top of the house," and kept there for a month with nothing but a little water and dry farinha for their sustenance and some cotton to keep themselves busy by spinning.

At the end of that ordeal, they were taken down and carried to the river, washed from head to foot, painted from the face down to the middle of the body, and then sent home naked to be adorned with feathers and celebrated in their new womanhood by the entire community with music and dancing.

[2] The Omaguas harvested their crops from the island mud-flats as well as from their swiddens; and they stored manioc underground in ingeniously designed pits, to be protected from the flood and then eaten during the next planting season.

They fought and hunted only with the lance, blowgun and boquetera, a sling discharging hard clay bullets used to kill the manatee, the river turtle and the enormous pirarucú fish.

[2] By the 1690s, Portuguese slave raids launched intermittently from Pará (modern-day Belém) became so intense and frequent that the Cambeba from distant communities, as well as neighboring Yurimagua, fled to the comparative safety of the Spanish Jesuit mission settlements near the mouth of the Napo River, including San Joaquin de Omaguas.

Zurmühlen remained with the Cambebas until 1726, and San Joaquin de Omaguas became the principal center for missionary activity in the lowland regions of Maynas until the Portuguese expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767.

The Cabanagem Revolt (1835–40), in which slave-hunters were killed and plantations burned, led to a resurgence of ethnic identity among indigenous peoples in Brazil,[28] however by the 1850s new controls under the Indian Directorate system, plus new forced labor programs set up to further the extraction of rubber, discouraged Cambeba traditions and culture.