Differently to the Tocantins groups, the Araguaia ones have abandoned activities such as ceramics, flute music, pipe manufacturing and smoking. Comparing both groups, one can conclude that the Avá-Canoeiro who have been 'on the move' longer, such as the ones from the Araguaia, have lost and/or stopped making a series of items of their material culture. This people's remarkable capacity for adapting should be stressed though, since the variety of eco-systems and contexts in which they live was quite large.

Its material culture is limited to a few dozen items, of which the only ones that do not have strictly practical usage are musical instruments and pipes. Body painting and feathers have virtually disappeared.

In contrast, the Avá-Canoeiro have incorporated a series of elements of Brazilian origin to their material culture, especially foodstuffs and metal articles. It is possible that such incorporation may have occurred before their arrival to Goiás and their characterization as an isolated group. When set apart from colonial society, the acquisition of such products became a problem. They often resorted to thefts, robberies and even plundering. Today they limit themselves to thefts or the use of metal products discarded by the 'white' population, such as abandoned automobiles, cans and other metal items that can be found at garbage dumps in the outskirts of cities, in farms or in towns.

The use of metal instruments and tools is traditional in the group. The Avá-Canoeiro have developed techniques for working the cold metal, giving it the appropriate shape for the use it is designed to have. Thus old springs from abandoned automobiles become blades of rustic machetes, gasoline drums are turned into arrowheads, nails are transformed into fishhooks etc. Metal-headed arrows may be the most characteristic product of Avá-Canoeiro manufacture; they have been known and their existence has been registered by several authors since the beginning of the 19th Century.

Other artifacts of their material culture reveal a proximity with materials that come from regional culture. The slaughtering of cattle and horses was so frequent that it gave origin to a series of articles made of leather, horns, hooves, horse hair, old ropes, pieces of cloth, salt (which they take from mangers in pastures), nylon threads, bags and agricultural instruments and products they find stored away in the fields of the regional population.

Because of their close links to all those products and because of the importance of cattle raising and planting fields in their diet, it is doubtful that the geographic movements of the Avá-Canoeiro really have the objective of keeping complete isolation from the regional population. Probably the objective was to find a region in which it would be possible to maintain an intermediate position vis a vis the national society: neither totally isolated nor too close. Their habitat, in the recent past, should combine those apparently contradictory characteristics: close enough to the 'whites' in order to take advantage of their resources, but in an area of slight human occupation where they could find refuge when needed. Under the Avá-Canoeiro point of view, the ideal region should also provide them with a permanent supply for hunting and gathering.