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The Yanomami people constitute an Amerindian society of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists who practise shifting slash-and-burn cultivation. They occupy a territory of about 192 000 km2 situated between Brazil and Venezuela, on either side of the Serra Parima mountain chain. From about 1910 to the 1960s the Yanomami of Brazil had only sporadic contact with the “white” world. Their first more frequent contact came in the period from 1973 to 1976, during the construction of a section of the Perimetral Norte highway in the south-east part of their territory. After a decade of relative respite, the Calha Norte project (1985-1986) and then, especially, the Roraima gold rush (1987-1989), quite abruptly intensified the advance of Brazilian regional society onto these Indians’ territory, triggering strong protests in Brazil, and also in the world beyond. These reactions led to the official recognition of their land, in 1992, in the form of a protected area of 96 650 km2, the Terra Indígena Yanomami. The following years saw the setting-up of a health care system, rudimentary and unsteady at first but which progressively became more efficient. This made a resumption of this ethnic group’s population growth possible. In spite of these successes, in the regions where the impact of illicit mining was most intense, since the end of the 1980s the local Yanomani groups have experienced profound social and economic changes. Hard hit from both the demographic and environmental points of view, they put into practice a series of modifications of their traditional use of the forest as an adaptation to the presence of gold diggers, then in response to the assistance scheme set in place during the process of the latter’s expulsion. This article examines an example of this variable geometry of Yanomami spatial strategies devised in response to contact, from a detailed study of the “Homoxi” region of the Upper Rio Mucajaí. Thus the Authors first describe the economic and geopolitical context of the region, in particular the gold rush in the state of Roraima at the end of the 1980s, which scientific literature has scarcely documented. They then focused down on a more local scale, looking at the history of three communities of the Homoxi region ( Tirei, Xere u and Yaritha, whose populations at the time of the field survey totalled just 360 people) and the process involved in the changes to their spatial and productive model, first in the face of the invasion of gold panners, then, after the latter had been evicted, in response to the local assistance scheme that was set up (FNS, FUNAI). The Authors thus bring out the flexiblity of the Yanomami social system and its ability to adapt quickly to the most adverse situations.