For nearly 500 years, explorers have hunted for a lost city— now with Google Earth, it may have been found.
Submitted by coldrum -- The legend of a lost Amazon civilisation has beguiled explorers and led many to their deaths. Some called their dream El Dorado. Others, notably Colonel Percy Fawcett, the gloriously moustached British explorer, named it the City of Z.
Scientists have now come close. The journal Antiquity published a report showing over 200 massive earthworks in the upper Amazon basin. The study's archeologists and historians believe these shapes are the remains of roads, bridges, moats, avenues and squares that formed the basis of a civilisation that could have supported 60,000 people.
It is an astonishing find. Since the 1980s anthropologists have uncovered evidence of civilisations in the Amazon basin: this latest development trumps them all.
David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z, says, “For centuries, scientists assumed the jungle was a death trap, where only small, primitive, tribes existed. These discoveries show the Amazon was home to a large civilisation that built a sophisticated society with monumental earthworks.”
The dream of finding lost civilisations in South America has persisted. As John Hemming, a former director of the Royal Geographical Society, recounts in his book, The Search For El Dorado, the conquistadors started the craze. The idea of a “golden city” in the wilds was lodged in the European imagination and never released its hold.
Grann notes a 1753 Portuguese soldier of fortune emerged from the Amazon describing how, “after a troublesome peregrination, incited by the greed of gold”, he had walked into a city, finding “stone arches, a statue, wide roads and a temple with hieroglyphics”.
Fawcett, sent on missions to South America by the Royal Geographical Society, read the bandeirante’s report. He was gripped. In 1918, he tried to raise funds for an expedition and was dismissed as a crackpot. Undeterred, in 1920 he led a shambolic mission to find the lost city - ending when he had to shoot his horse. Fawcett’s expeditions often had an amateurish feel. The explorer’s eccentricity masked a fervent conviction in the existence of a lost city. In 1925 Fawcett, near-destitute, set out on his second and last expedition to find the City of Z. He wrote to his wife: “You need have no fear of any failure.” But he was never seen again.
Nearly a century after Fawcett’s disappearance, his instincts appear to have been proved correct. “Although he expected the City of Z to be built of stone, and he had a more fantastical notion of what it would look like, these discoveries show that he was ... extraordinarily prescient,” says Grann.
Others are not convinced. Hemming says that while the paper in Antiquity is “significant work by serious people ... none of this has anything remotely to do with El Dorado or that racist, incompetent nutter Percy Fawcett.
Both men can agree that this discovery is an advance in our knowledge of the region. The breakthrough was years in the making. In 2002 Martti Parssinen, one of the report’s co-authors, was called by Alceu Ranzi, who saw geometrical shapes while flying over the Amazon. Remembers Parssinen, “He realised they must have been made by indigenous people.” “We are only beginning to understand Amazonia.”
Grann believes this discovery will lead to a reassessment of pre-Columbian Amazon. He says, “the study's authors estimate only 10% of the earthworks [are found]. It will take decades to uncover the Amazonian civilisations.”
It has also taken decades for Fawcett’s reputation to be revived. Whatever Fawcett’s foibles, he does appear to have been broadly right. Moreover, his memory will be prolonged by a film adaptation in which he will be played by Brad Pitt. Talk about a comeback.
For more, see timesonline.
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