The Lost City of Z; Greatest Exploration Mystery of the 20th Century
Posted on 24. Feb, 2009 by Shannon Graham in Archeological Excavations, Artifact Finds, Miscellaneous
The Amazon Jungle, the last great unexplored region on the map. It is the birthplace of El Dorado, ‘the gilded man’, where it was said a tribal chief would cover himself in gold dust blown from a hollow cane. This tale of gold excess lured Spanish conquistadors into the region and many to their death.
Enter Percy Harrison Fawcett, an inspiration for Indiana Jones. A surveyor by trade, Fawcett trained at the prestigious Royal Geographic Society in London and spent two decades working in Bolivia, Brazil and Peru. Fawcett believed there to be at least one and possibly more ancient civilizations in the Amazon rainforest and in 1925, launched an expedition to discover his self-named ‘City of Z’.
He was the last of a breed of explorers to venture into blank spots on the map with little more than a machete, a compass, and an almost divine sense of purpose, and he spent nearly two decades gathering evidence to prove his case and pinpointing a location.
Many modern scientists believe that such an inhospitable place could not support any civilization of size.
Fawcett made contact with unknown tribes and documented how they adapted to the harsh conditions of the jungle.
They often used the Amazonian flood plains, which were more fertile than terra firma, to grow crops, and relied on elaborate ways of hunting and fishing. As a result, they were able to generate enough food to sustain larger populations – a precursor to any sort of complex society with divisions of labor and political hierarchies such as chiefdoms and kingdoms. “Food problems never bothered them,” Fawcett said.
Fawcett and his party vanished never to be heard from again. His disappearance spawned many search expeditions to locate his remains and the cause of his demise. In 1955, the New York Times reported that “Fawcett’s disappearance had set off more searches than those launched through the centuries to find the fabulous El Dorado.” Many in these search parties turned back. Some were killed by native tribesman. Others suffered the same fate as Fawcett disappearing completely without a trace.
Fawcett has largely been forgotten however modern archeologists are finding evidence of what Fawcett claimed all along; ancient ruins are buried in the Amazonian rainforests. And these finds are challenging perceptions of what the Americas really looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
Even though the conquistadores had not found a golden kingdom, they had reported seeing “cities that glistened in white,” with temples, public squares, palisade walls, causeways, and exquisite artifacts. Because later explorers never came across similar settlements – or indeed any large populations – it was assumed these descriptions, like El Dorado itself, were simply products of the conquistadores’ fervid imaginations.
Fawcett did discover that just about every high plateau above the flood plain contained artifacts. When scaling one large earthen mound, he found a pottery shard. This certainly got his attention causing him to search and find more. Fawcett likened the craftsmanship of the ceramics as rivaling that of ancient Greece, Rome and China. He also noted that between this high mounds were what appeared to be roads and causeways.
In more recent times archeologist have visited the region with sophisticated tools such as “ground-penetrating radar, satellite imagery to map sites, and remote sensors that can pinpoint buried artifacts.” One archeologist terms the finds as “earth shattering.”
In the last few years, a team of researchers led by the archeologist Michael Heckenberger uncovered 20 pre-Columbian settlements in the Xingu region of the southern basin of the Amazon – the very region where Fawcett believed he would find the City of Z and where he disappeared. These settlements, which were occupied roughly between 800 and 1600 AD, included houses and moats and palisade walls. There were causeways and roads, which connected the settlements together. There were plazas laid out along cardinal points, from east to west, and roads positioned at the same geometric angles. (Fawcett had reported that Indians told him legends that described “many streets set at right angles to one another.” ) According to the scientists, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 people, which means that the larger communities were the size of many medieval European cities.
Other significant finds include those by Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaugher of Theodore Roosevelt, who is an archeologist at the University of Illinois. She discovered remains in a cave that could possibly be 10,000 years old – “about twice as old as scientists had estimated the human presence in the Amazon.”
In the cave and at a nearby riverbank settlement, Roosevelt made another astonishing discovery: pottery that dates to 7,500 years ago, predating by more than 2,000 years the earliest pottery found in the Andes or Mesoamerica. This means that the Amazon may have been the earliest ceramic-producing region in all the Americas, and that, as Fawcett radically argued, the region was possibly even a wellspring of South American civilization – that an advanced culture had spread outward, rather than vice versa.
Technology is also revealing many man-made earthen mounds and causeways dissecting the Amazon rainforest.
Some scientists now believe the rain forest may have sustained millions of people. And for the first time scholars are reevaluating the El Dorado chronicles that Fawcett used to piece together his theory of Z. Though no one has found evidence of the fantastical gold that the conquistadores had dreamed of, the anthropologist Neil Whitehead said, “With some caveats, El Dorado really did exist.”
These scholars say they are just beginning the process of understanding this ancient world – and, like the theory of who first populated the Americas, all the traditional paradigms must be reevaluated. “Anthropologists,” Heckenberger said, “made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the 20th century and seeing only small tribes and saying, ‘Well, that’s all there is.’ The problem is that, by then, many Indian populations had already been wiped out by what was essentially a holocaust from European contact. That’s why the first Europeans in the Amazon described such massive settlements that, later, no one could ever find.”
And if this interests you, you’re not alone. Rumor has it that Brad Pitt is considering major motion picture on Fawcett and his quest. Get the full story here and stay tuned.
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