The settlement patterns of the Guaná or Chané villages (oneó) changed over the years as a result of the territorial limitation imposed on these groups after the war with Paraguay. Before the war – that we consider here as the “historical times" – when there still was a large amount of territory available, the distribution of the Guaná villages was not different from what we might call the “classic” pattern, described by Sanches Labrador (El Paraguai Catolico: 275-276). This pattern combined – as the first chroniclers in the 17^th Century indicated for the Guaná of the southern Chaco – a well-developed agriculture with hunting, fishing and, already in Brazil at that time, cattle and horse-raising – which they learned to deal with during the long period of their living together with the Mbayá-Guaicurú.

This settlement pattern – in which the villages was established at a privileged point of the territory – demanded an area of considerable size, given that the gardens (cawané), belonging to the same kin group (led by a “captain” or chief of the extended family), were spread out over contiguous “galley forests” over the years.

Villages

Historically, Guaná villages had, on the average, from 30 to 40 houses (ovocuti) and, according to Sanches Labrador, each house "[measured] from 16 to 20 yards in length by 8 in width" in which there lived "[a] captain...together with his brothers and kin...[and] each house has five doors". If we consider that houses with these dimensions (15 x 7 meters at least) sheltered 20-30 people (five domestic groups, delimited by their “doors”), then we can estimate the population of the villages in Êxiva to have been between 600 to 1,200 people – numbers that, as we saw in the previous item, were maintained in Brazil until the first half of the 19th Century.

The domestic groups (consisting of husband, wife, children, daughters’ husbands and, occasionally, slaves from other indigenous groups, the so-called cauti) of each house possessed contiguous areas for gardens. None of the chroniclers, of the Chaco or Brazil, mentions the dimensions of the Terena gardens in historical times (that is, before the war with Paraguay). However, the present-day Terena state that the “stump” gardens of their grandfathers yielded, on the average, six "tarefas" (an old land measure equal to 30 square "braças" or around 3,600 m²) per domestic group (that is, about 2.16 hectares). This figure is totally compatible with the tools then used by the Guaná for their agriculture – which were much more developed than, for example, those used by the Guarani, their southern neighbors and also agriculturalists.

The choice of place for the establishment of the Guaná villages should take into account the availability of woods which were signs of suitable soil for the formation of gardens and hunting, gathering, and fishing areas (lakes or good-sized rivers), necessary for the dry season (and the period between harvesting of cultivated products). Alongside that, the territory of this group had to have a good-sized area for cattle and horse-raising (which is documented in many of the historical texts on the Guaná in Brazil).

Given these criteria – and limitations imposed by the ecological conditions of the Brazilian pre-Pantanal –, the only region suitable for the establishment of the Guaná villages would be the interfluve of Miranda-Aquidauana-Taquari. Moreover, social limits and physical barriers restricted the Guaná groups to that region. To the south (at the headwaters of the Miranda and Maracajú mountain) and to the east (the so-called “fields of Vacaria”, beyond Aquidauana), the limits to Guaná expansion were represented, on the one hand, by the “Coroados” (Ofayé-Xavante) Indians and, on the other, by the Kaiowá-Guarani (interfluve of Brilhante-Dourados-Apa). To the north, the barriers were the Pantanal and the Guató Indians, historical enemies of the Guaná – as various chroniclers (for example, Castelnau: 1949) and classic studies (like Metraux:1946) mention.