The Lost City of Z

by David Grann

  Paolo was sitting in the shade of the nearest hut. “I’m sorry I didn’t go back for you,” he said. “I didn’t think I could make it.” His vest was draped around his neck, and he was sipping water from a bowl. He handed the bowl to me, and though the water hadn’t been boiled, I drank it greedily, letting it spill around my neck.

  “Now you have some kind of real picture in your mind of what it was like for Fawcett,” he said. “Now we go home, no?”

  Before I could reply, a Kuikuro man came and told us to follow him. I paused for a moment uncertainly, then walked with him across the dusty central plaza, which was some two hundred and fifty yards in diameter— the largest one, I was told, in the Xingu. Two fires had recently swept through the huts along the plaza’s perimeter, the flames leaping from one thatched roof to the next, leaving much of the settlement in ashes. The Kuikuro man paused outside one of the surviving homes and told us to enter. Near the door, I could see two magnificent clay sculptures—one of a frog, the other of a jaguar. I was admiring them when an enormous man stepped out of the shadows. He was built like Tamakafi, a mythical Xinguano fighter who, according to legend, had a colossal body, his arms as thick as thighs, his legs as big as a chest. The man wore only a thin bathing suit, and he had a bowl haircut that somehow made his stern face seem even more imposing.

  “I am Afukaká,” he said, in a surprisingly soft, measured voice. It was clear that he was the chief. He offered Paolo and me lunch—a bowl of fish and rice—which his two wives, who were sisters, served us. He seemed interested in the outside world and asked me many questions about New York, about the skyscrapers and restaurants.

  As we spoke, a sweet serenading sound filtered into the hut. I turned to the door as a group of women dancers and men with bamboo flutes entered. The men, who were naked, had covered their bodies with elaborate painted images of fish and tortoises and anacondas, the shapes weaving along their arms and legs, the orange and yellow and red colors gleaming with sweat. Around the eyes of most of them were black circles of paint, which resembled masks at a costume party. Their heads were topped with large, colorful feathers.

  Afukaká and Paolo and I stood as the group crowded into the hut. The men stepped forward twice, then back, then forward again, all the time blowing their flutes, some of which were ten feet long—beautiful pieces of bamboo that released humming tones, like wind catching an open bottle top. Several young girls with long black hair danced alongside the men, their arms slung over the shoulders of the person in front of them, forming a chain; they, too, were naked, except for strings of snail shells around their necks and a bark-cloth triangle, or uluri, that covered their pubic area. Some of the pubescent girls had recently been held in seclusion, and their bodies were paler than those of the men. Their necklaces rattled as they stamped their feet, adding to the insistent rhythm of the music. The group circled us for several minutes, then ducked under the doorway and disappeared into the plaza, the sound of the flutes fading as the musicians and the dancers entered the next hut.

  I asked Afukaká about the ritual, and he said that it was a festival for fish spirits. “It is a way to commune with the spirits,” he said. “We have hundreds of ceremonies—all beautiful.”

  After a while, I mentioned Fawcett. Afukaká echoed almost precisely what the Kalapalo chief had told me. “The fierce Indians must have killed them,” he said. Indeed, it seemed likely that one of the more warlike tribes in the region—most likely the Suyás, as Aloique had suggested, or the Kayapós or the Xavante—had slaughtered the party; it was improbable that all three Englishmen would have starved to death, given Fawcett’s talent for surviving in the jungle for long periods. But that was as far as the evidence led me, and I felt a sudden resignation. “Only the forest knows all,” Paolo said.

  While we were talking, a curious figure appeared. His skin was white, although parts of it had been scalded red from the sun, and he had scruffy blond hair. He wore baggy shorts and no shirt and carried a machete. It was Michael Heckenberger. “So you made it,” he said with a smile, looking at my drenched, dirty clothes.

  It was true what I had been told: he had been adopted by Afukaká, who had built him a hut right next to his own home. Heckenberger said that he had been doing research here on and off for the last thirteen years. During that time, he had battled everything from malaria to virulent bacteria that made his skin peel off. His body was also once invaded by maggots, like Murray’s. “It was kind of horrifying,” Heckenberger said. Because of the prevailing notion that the Amazon was a counterfeit paradise, most archaeologists had long ago abandoned the remote Xingu. “They assumed it was an archaeological black hole,” Heckenberger said, adding that Fawcett was “the exception.”

  Heckenberger knew the story of Fawcett well and had even tried to conduct his own inquiry into his fate. “I’m fascinated by him and what he did in that time period,” Heckenberger said. “He was one of these larger-than-life figures. Anyone who would jump in a canoe or march in here at a time when you know some of the Indians are going to try to—” He stopped in mid-sentence, as if contemplating the consequences.

  He said that Fawcett was easy to dismiss as “a crank;” he lacked the tools and the discipline of a modern archaeologist, and he never questioned the shibboleth that any lost city in the Amazon had to have European origins. But even though Fawcett was an amateur, he went on, he was able to see things more clearly than many professional scholars.

  “I want to show you something,” Heckenberger said at one point.

  Holding his machete in front of him, he led Paolo, Afukaká, and me into the forest, cutting away tendrils from trees, which shot upward, fighting for the glow of the sun. After walking for a mile or so, we reached an area where the forest thinned. Heckenberger pointed to the ground with his machete. “See how the land dips?” he asked.

  Indeed, the ground seemed to slope downward for a long stretch, then tilt upward again, as if someone had carved out an enormous ditch.

  “It’s a moat,” Heckenberger said.

  “What do you mean, a moat?”

  “A moat. A defensive ditch.” He added, “From nearly nine hundred years ago.”

  Paolo and I tried to follow the moat’s contours, which curved in a nearly perfect circle through the woods. Heckenberger said that the moat had originally measured between a dozen and sixteen feet deep, and about thirty feet wide. It was nearly a mile in diameter. I thought of the “long, deep ditches” that the spirit Fitsi-fitsi was said to have built around settlements. “The Kuikuros knew they existed, but they didn’t realize that their own ancestors had built them,” Heckenberger said.

  Afukaká, who had helped with the excavation, said, “We thought they were made by the spirits.”

  Heckenberger walked over to a rectangular hole in the ground, where he had excavated part of the moat. Paolo and I peered over the edge with the chief. The exposed earth, in contrast to other parts of the forest, was dark, almost black. Using radiocarbon dating, Heckenberger had dated the trench to about A.D. 1200. He pointed the tip of his machete to the bottom of the hole, where there seemed to be a ditch within the ditch. “That’s where they put the palisade wall,” he said.

  “A wall?” I asked.

  Heckenberger smiled and went on, “All around the moat, you can see these funnel shapes, equally spread apart. There are only two explanations. Either they had traps at the bottom or they had something sticking into them, like tree trunks.”

  He said that the concept of traps for invading enemies to fall into was unlikely, since the people the moat was supposed to be protecting would have been in peril themselves. What’s more, he said, when he examined the moats with Afukaká, the chief told him a legend about a Kuikuro who had escaped from another village by leaping over “a great palisade wall and ditch.”

  Still, none of it seemed to make sense. Why would anyone build a moat and a stockade wall in the middle of the wilderness? “There’s nothing here,” I said.

  Heckenberge
r didn’t respond; instead, he bent down and rooted through the dirt, picking up a piece of hardened clay with grooves along the edges. He held it up to the light. “Broken pottery,” he said. “It’s everywhere.”

  As I looked at other shards on the ground, I thought of how Fawcett had insisted that on certain high areas in the Amazon “very little scratching will produce an abundance” of ancient pottery.

  Heckenberger said that we were standing in the middle of a vast ancient settlement.

  “Poor Fawcett—he was so close,” Paolo said.

  The settlement was in the very region where Fawcett believed it would be. But it was understandable why he might not have been able to see it, Heckenberger went on. “There isn’t a lot of stone in the jungle, and most of the settlement was built with organic materials—wood and palms and earth mounds—which decompose,” he said. “But once you begin to map out the area and excavate it you are blown away by what you see.”

  He began walking once more through the forest, pointing out what were, clearly, the remains of a massive man-made landscape. There was not just one moat but three, arranged in concentric circles. There was a giant circular plaza where the vegetation had a different character from that of the rest of the forest, because it had once been swept clean. And there had been a sprawling neighborhood of dwellings, as evidenced by even denser black soil, which had been enriched by decomposed garbage and human waste.

  As we walked around, I noticed an embankment that extended into the forest in a straight line. Heckenberger said that it was a road curb.

  “They had roads, too?” I asked.

  “Roads. Causeways. Canals.” Heckenberger said that some roads had been nearly a hundred and fifty feet wide. “We even found a place where the road ends at one side of a river in a kind of ascending ramp and then continues on the other side with a descending ramp. Which can only mean one thing: there had to have been some kind of wooden bridge connecting them, over an area that was a half mile long.”

  They were the very same kinds of dreamlike causeways and settlements that the Spanish conquistadores had spoken of when they visited the Amazon, the ones in which Fawcett had so fervently believed and which twentieth-century scientists had dismissed as myths. I asked Heckenberger where the roads led, and he said that they extended to other, equally complex sites. “I just took you to the closest one,” he said.

  Altogether, he had uncovered twenty pre-Columbian settlements in the Xingu, which had been occupied roughly between A.D. 800 and A.D. 1600. The settlements were about two to three miles apart and were connected by roads. More astounding, the plazas were laid out along cardinal points, from east to west, and the roads were positioned at the same geometric angles. (Fawcett said that Indians had told him legends that described “many streets set at right angles to one another.”)

  Borrowing my notebook, Heckenberger began to sketch a huge circle, then another and another. These were the plazas and the villages, he said. He then drew rings around them, which he said were the moats. Finally, he added several parallel lines that jutted out from each of the settlements in precise angles—the roads, bridges, and causeways. Each form seemed to fit into an elaborate whole, like an abstract painting whose elements cohere only at a distance. “Once my team and I started to map everything out, we discovered that nothing was done by accident,” Heckenberger said. “All these settlements were laid out with a complicated plan, with a sense of engineering and mathematics that rivaled anything that was happening in much of Europe at the time.”

  Heckenberger said that before Western diseases devastated the population, each cluster of settlements contained anywhere from two thousand to five thousand people, which means that the larger community was the size of many medieval European cities. “These people had a cultural aesthetic of monumentality,” he said. “They liked to have beautiful roads and plazas and bridges. Their monuments were not pyramids, which is why they were so hard to find; they were horizontal features. But they’re no less extraordinary.”

  Heckenberger told me that he had just published his research, in a book called The Ecology of Power. Susanna Hecht, a geographer at UCLA’s School of Public Affairs, called Heckenberger’s findings “extraordinary.” Other archaeologists and geographers later described them to me as “monumental,” “transformative,” and “ earth-shattering.” Heckenberger has helped to upend the view of the Amazon as a counterfeit paradise that could never sustain what Fawcett had envisioned: a prosperous, glorious civilization.

  Other scientists, I discovered, were contributing to this revolution in archaeology, which challenges virtually everything that was once believed about the Americas before Columbus. These archaeologists are often aided by gadgets that surpass anything Dr. Rice could have imagined. They include ground-penetrating radar, satellite imagery to map sites, and remote sensors that can detect magnetic fields in the soil to pinpoint buried artifacts. Anna Roosevelt, a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt’s who is an archaeologist at the University of Illinois, has excavated a cave near Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon, that was filled with rock paintings—renditions of animal and human figures similar to those that Fawcett had described seeing in various parts of the Amazon and that bolstered his theory of Z. Buried in the cave were remains of a settlement at least ten thousand years old—about twice as old as scientists had estimated the human presence in the Amazon. Indeed, the settlement is so ancient that it has cast doubt on the long-held theory of how the Americas were first populated. For years, archaeologists believed that the earliest American inhabitants were the Clovis—named for the spear points found in Clovis, New Mexico. It was thought that these big-game hunters had crossed the Bering Strait from Asia at the end of the Ice Age and settled in North America around eleven thousand years ago and then gradually migrated down to Central and South America. The Amazon settlement, however, may be as old as the first undisputed Clovis settlement in North America. Moreover, according to Roosevelt, the telltale signs of the Clovis culture—such as spears with distinctly fluted rock points—were not present in the Amazon cave. Some archaeologists now believe that there may have been a people that preceded the Clovis. Others, like Roosevelt, think that the same people from Asia simultaneously radiated throughout the Americas and developed their own distinct cultures.

  In the cave and at a nearby riverbank settlement, Roosevelt made another astonishing discovery: seventy-five-hundred-year-old pottery, which predates by more than two thousand 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 civilization throughout South America—that an advanced culture had spread outward, rather than vice versa.

  Using aerial photography and satellite imaging, scientists have also begun to find enormous man-made earth mounds often connected by causeways across the Amazon—in particular in the Bolivian floodplains where Fawcett first found his shards of pottery and reported that “wherever there are ‘alturas,’ that is high ground above the plains, . . . there are artifacts.” Clark Erickson, an anthropologist from the University of Pennsylvania who has studied these earthworks in Bolivia, told me that the mounds allowed the Indians to continue farming during seasonal floods and to avoid the leaching process that can deprive the soil of nutrients. To create them, he said, required extraordinary labor and engineering: tons of soil had to be transported, the course of rivers altered, canals excavated, and interconnecting roadways and settlements built. In many ways, he said, the mounds “rival the Egyptian pyramids.”

  Perhaps most startling is evidence that Indians transformed the landscape even where it was a counterfeit paradise—that is to say, where the soil was too infertile to sustain a large population. Scientists have uncovered throughout the jungle large stretches of terra preta do Indio, or “Indian black earth”: soil that has been enriched with organic human waste and charcoal from fires, so th
at it is made exceptionally fertile. It is not clear if Indian black earth was an accidental by-product of human inhabitation or, as some scientists think, was created by design—by a careful and systematic “charring” of the soil with smoldering fires, like the Kayapós’ practice in the Xingu. In either case, many Amazonian tribes appear to have exploited this rich soil to grow crops where agriculture was once thought inconceivable. Scientists have uncovered so much black earth from ancient settlements in the Amazon that they now believe the rainforest 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. As Roosevelt put it, what Carvajal described was without question “no mirage.” Scientists have admittedly not found evidence of the fantastical gold that the conquistadores had dreamed of. But the anthropologist Neil Whitehead says, “With some caveats, El Dorado really did exist.”

  Heckenberger told me that scientists were just beginning the process of understanding this ancient world—and, like the theory of who first populated the Americas, all the traditional paradigms had to be reevaluated. In 2006, evidence even emerged that, in some parts of the Amazon, Indians built with stone. Archaeologists with the Amapa Institute of Scientific and Technological Research uncovered, in the northern Brazilian Amazon, an astronomical observatory tower made of huge granite rocks: each one weighed several tons, and some were nearly ten feet tall. The ruins, believed to be anywhere from five hundred to two thousand years old, have been called “the Stonehenge of the Amazon.”

  “Anthropologists,” Heckenberger said, “made the mistake of coming into the Amazon in the twentieth 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.”