It was the ethnologist Peter Silverwood-Cope who inaugurated field research on the Maku, more specifically on the Bara, staying among them from 1968 to 1970. His doctoral thesis was recently published in Portuguese (Silverwood-Cope, 1990) and approaches various aspects of Maku culture, such as its ecologico-economic basis and socio-political organization, as well as mythological and cosmological conceptions.

In the following decade, Howard Reid (1979) focused on mobility, the individual's developmental cycle and cultural change among the Hupdu - without, though, neglecting more traditional ethnographic topics, such as the ethnography of hunting and gathering, kinship structure, rituals and mythology. From the 1980s onwards, Pozzobon (1984, 1992) dedicated himself to the study of Maku social organization, establishing a socio-structural model applicable as a whole to the Bara, Hupdu and Yuhupdu, and based on the relations between ethnic identity, regional/ dialectal endogamy and the demography of significant social units.

Mention should also be made of the studies by Athias (1995, 1998) on the Hupdu sedentarized in mission-villages, focusing on various aspects of ecology, economy, social organization and cosmology, and above all conceptions linked to health and sickness.

On the Nukak, see the works by Franky Calvo, Cabrera Becerra and Mahecha (1995, 1999), as well as Politis (1996), dedicated to linguistic aspects, spatial mobility and the general ethnography of this people. Finally, the Nadöb are described in works by Schultz (1959), Münzel (1969) and Pozzobon (1998), which, although not resulting in in-depth ethnographies, provide important information on this little known section of the Maku people.