The first ever record the Arikapú and a sample of their language was made by colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, an Englishman hired in the early 20th century by the Bolivian government to survey the Bolivian-Brazilian frontier. Fawcett met a group of Indians he called Maxubí on one of the eastern tributaries of the upper Rio Branco (Fawcett 1915, B. Fawcett 1953). After Fawcett, the Maxubí were never encountered or heard of again. The major part of the word list recorded by Fawcett is identical to Arikapú, so they probably represent the same tribe. At that time they apparently had not had any previous contact with Westerners.

Twenty years later, the German ethnographer Emil Heinrich Snethlage visited the Guaporé region on behalf of the Museum for Ethnology in Berlin (Snethlage 1937). Snethlage met many peoples of the Rio Branco, including the Arikapú, and returned to Berlin with a collection of objects, photographs, film and music recordings on wax rolls (Snethlage 1939). At this time, the peoples of the region had already suffered several devastating epidemics of measles, influenza, and other contagious diseases that spread rapidly throughout the region. The Arikapú had been especially affected by the diseases and when Snethlage met them in 1934, they formed only a small group, divided between two settlements.

Between 1948 and 1955 the Swiss ethnographer Franz Caspar lived in the Rio Branco region, and he became well known for his impressive work on traditional Tuparí culture (1958, 1975). Caspar also collected extensive word lists of all the languages he encountered, including Arikapú. Moreover, he had access to Snethlage’s diaries and cited them in his doctoral dissertation (Caspar 1953). Caspar is still remembered by the elderly people.

In early 1954, the Indians of the Rio Branco suffered another terrible measles epidemic. The Arikapú were apparently hit very hard again and when Caspar returned in 1954 they had been reduced to one small group.

In 1968 missionary linguists Willem Bontkes and Robert Campbell surveyed the south of Rondônia for the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Bontkes noted down a short Arikapú wordlist at Rio Branco and mentions the existence of 14 speakers of the language.
In the 1980s several anthropologists and linguists visited the region and met speakers of Arikapú. The ethno-historian Denise Maldi undertook anthropological research during which she interviewed many elderly people and collected traditional myths for her survey of what she called the Marico cultural complex (Maldi 1991). Anthropologist Betty Mindlin also travelled extensively in the region, and collected and published various popular volumes of traditional tales of indigenous peoples (Mindlin 1993, 1998, 1999). In addition, the linguist Denny Moore of the Museu Goeldi collected comparative word lists in the Guaporé reserve. Between 2001 and 2004, Hein van der Voort conducted linguistic fieldwork with the two known remaining speakers of Arikapú.