the amazon’s lost cities

You’ve no doubt heard of El Dorado: a mythical civilization, deep in the heart of South America’s wilderness, where gold is as commonplace as soil. European explorers had already, after all, discovered great and wealthy empires in Mexico and in the Andes, and there were tales from the earliest explorers of the Amazon of vast cities, some of them already in ruins. The mythology of the Amazon’s lost cities is an extensive one, marked in particular by the disappearance of British explorer Percy Fawcett while attempting to find what he dubbed “The Lost City of Z”. Even more expeditions have gone into the Amazon in the last century to attempt to find traces of Fawcett’s party, but one anthropologist from the University of Florida, Michael Heckenberger, has been successful in discovering not one lost city but an entire network, each fortified city about three miles from the next, suggesting that the early Amazon was highly urbanized. He believes that the inhabitants of these cities were the ancestors of the present-day tribesmen in the same area, the Kuikuro.

How, then, did it take us so long to uncover this civilization? For one thing, the Amazon is hardly a hospitable climate for ruins. While the cities were only abandoned roughly 400 years ago, not long at all when compared with the remnants of ancient Greek civilization, for instance, their only remaining traces are some earthworks and darker soil, called terra preta, where the land had been cultivated. And how did we get the notion that there had been advanced civilization in the Amazon in the first place? Until recently, many experts considered it highly unlikely, citing the poor quality of Amazon soil and the unreliability of our only reports of cities there, which came from the earliest conquistadores. The fact is, it seems, that when Europeans arrived, their diseases spread more quickly than their stories, and by the time reliable witnesses made it into the Amazon, the population had already been decimated and the more visible traces of civilization swallowed by the rainforest. Congratulations to Michael Heckenberger, who by collaborating with the Kuikuro to find the subtlest signs has finally uncovered Fawcett’s legendary “Z”.