El Dorado: Fact or Fiction?

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In 2005, there was an article in the New Yorker about a British explorer and his son who vanished in 1925 on their quest to discover a “lost civilization hidden in the Amazon.”  In 2009, David Grann expanded his article into a book and soon there will be a movie starring Brad Pitt as Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett—the man who tried (and failed) to find the fabled El Dorado or “City of Z.”  All reminders, if any were needed, that we remain endlessly fascinated by the idea that deep within the Amazon lie remnants of an ancient civilization.  And now, archaeologists (and several newspapers) are saying our fantasies may have some basis in fact.

According to an article in Antiquity, an archaeologist was browsing “Google Earth satellite imagery” and noticed “geometric earthworks, linked by roads” deep within what was once the Amazon rainforest.  Popular accounts claim that this seemingly fortuitous discovery was made possible, in large part, by the deforestation of the Amazon jungle which in turn enabled archaeologists to glimpse these remains.

Headlines aside, this is not the first time archaeologists have found traces of an ancient Amazonian peoples.  In 2003, for example, Clark Erickson summarized more than a decade of research about soil in Amazonian interior.  The research documented prolonged irrigation showing that ancient Amazonians did much “to improve their environment” through farming on a grand scale.  Likewise in 2003, Michael Heckenberger and colleagues published “Amazonia 1492: Pristine Forest or Cultural Parkland” in which they documented the remains of “large, well-engineered public works (such as plazas, roads, moats, and bridges)… rivaling that of many contemporary complex societies…”  And in 2005, David Grann, following in Fawcett’s footsteps, found (as had the amateur archaeologist before him) that the Amazon is “saturated with traditions… which suggest the prior presence of a once-great civilization.” 

By 2007, the idea that an ancient peoples had colonized what is now the Amazon rainforest was so widely accepted by the scientific community that the Discover magazine  ran a feature article about the Central Amazon Project and the artifacts scientists associated with it had uncovered.  Thus, although Google Earth’s images provided vivid evidence that of far-flung and complex civilization in the heart of the Amazon, Google’s images did not come in a vacuum.  By 2009, archaeologists were ready for those images; were, indeed, expecting to find them. 

So it appears that Colonel Percy Fawcett, the last of the great amateur archaeologists, who gave his life trying to find the remains of an ancient Amazonian empire, has finally been vindicated.  For while there is scant proof that a city of gold ever existed, there is a plethora of evidence that a people and culture whose complexity “rivaled anything that was happening in Europe at the time” did.

The El Dorado of the treasure hunters is probably a myth.  A great civilization that existed between 800 and 1600 A.D. was probably a reality.