Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the early 20th century, a British explorer became convinced that somewhere deep in the Amazon lay the remains of a sophisticated civilization. He spent years gathering clues from old manuscripts, indigenous accounts, and his own expeditions. And for decades, his theory was dismissed as fantasy. But modern archaeology has begun finding evidence that he may, in fact, have been on to something. Learn more about Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Zee on this episode of Everything Everywhere, Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.

Starting point is 00:01:09 Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. that's I can't sleep with Benjamin Boster. Percy Harrison Fawcett was born in 1867 in Torquay, England, into a family whose fortunes had been reduced considerably from what they had once been. Fawcett trained as an artillery officer in the Royal Artillery before finding his true vocation with the Royal Geographical Society, which in 1906 sends him to South America to survey the disputed border between Bolivia and Brazil. That first expedition set the pattern for the rest of his career.

Starting point is 00:02:07 He proved himself extraordinarily capable in the field, enduring conditions that would have broken most men, and he returned from the Amazon convinced that the received wisdom about the Amazon was wrong. Scholars of his day held that the rainforest could never have supported anything beyond scattered primitive tribes. Fawcett came to believe the opposite, that somewhere in the unmapped interior lay the remains of a sophisticated, perhaps even monumental, lost culture. Far from inventing his theory out of thin air, Fawcett built his hypothesis on colonial records, early European accounts of densely populated Amazonian communities, and archaeological finds. Together, these sources bolstered its conviction that mainstream assumptions were entirely

Starting point is 00:02:57 mistaken. Stories of lost civilizations had circulated for centuries, when Spanish expeditions penetrated the continent in the 16th century, they encountered enormous indigenous civilizations in Mexico and the Andes. The discovery of the Aztec and Inca empires made stories of additional wealthy kingdoms seem entirely plausible. One of the most famous of these stories became El Dorado. Originally, El Dorado referred to a person, the gilded man, associated with ceremonies in what is now Colombia. But over time, European imagination transformed the story into a wealthy kingdom or Golden City supposedly hidden somewhere in the interior. Explorers consequently searched enormous areas of Venezuela, Colombia, Guyana, and the Amazon

Starting point is 00:03:45 basin. But another strand of evidence was less fantastic, but far more interesting. Early travelers along the Amazon sometimes described large, densely populated communities. The Dominican friar, Caspar de Carvajal, who accompanied He accompanied Francisco de Oriana down the Amazon in 1541 and 1542, described settlements that seem to extend considerable distances along the river. Fawcett's conviction sharpened considerably after he examined a document in Rio de Janeiro's National Library, known as Manuscript 512, an 18th century account attributed to a Portuguese expedition that claimed to have stumbled upon a ruined stone city, complete with arched

Starting point is 00:04:32 gateways, statues, and inscriptions in an unknown script. Fawcett folded this account together with older indigenous testimony and centuries of legends about El Dorado. From these threads, he constructed his target, which he referred to in his surveying notes simply as Z, or Zed, most likely intending it as a working label for a set of coordinates. He believed that Zee lay somewhere along the Zingu River Basin of Brazil, of Brazil, Brazil's motto Grososte. Fawcett mounted several expeditions into the region over the following two decades, interrupted only by his service in the First World War, where he commanded artillery on the

Starting point is 00:05:13 Western Front and was decorated for his conduct at the Battle of the Somme. By the mid-1920s, founded partially by a newspaper syndicate and partially by his own reputation as the era's foremost authority on the unmapped Amazon, he organized what would be his final attempt. In April of 1925, he set out from the city of Kuyaba with his elder son Jack and Jack's close friend, Raleigh Rimmel, deliberately keeping the party small in the belief that a large expedition would draw hostility from local tribes and strain supply lines beyond sustainability. His last confirmed communication, which was sent by a native runner in late May of 1925, reported that the party was about to cross into territory, from which he wrote, further letters were unlikely to reach civilization. No credible trace of Fawcett, his son, or Rimmel were ever found.

Starting point is 00:06:09 The disappearance of Percy Fawcett and his team became one of the 20th century's enduring mysteries and spawned a small industry of rescue attempts, rumors, and outright fraud. Over the subsequent decades, more than a dozen expeditions went searching for Fawcett or his remains, and by some estimates, as many as a hundred people died in the attempt, whether from disease, drowning, or violent encounters with indigenous groups, understandably wary of armed strangers. Several theories were proposed to explain his disappearance. One was that he had been killed by the Kalapalo people, whose oral history does describe an encounter with the party.

Starting point is 00:06:50 Another was that he had gone native and chosen to remain in the jungle by design, having hinted before departure at an interest in founding a utopian community there. And finally, the simplest and most likely was that he had simply perished of starvation or disease, an unremarkable end to an expedition that had always courted catastrophe. In 1951, Brazilian explorer Orlando Villas Bolas reported recovering human bones that indigenous informants suggested might be faucets. Some observers became convinced that the remains finally solved the mystery. But Fawcett's family was skeptical.

Starting point is 00:07:27 Later analysis indicated that the bones did not match what was known of Percy Fawcett's physical characteristics. No theory has ever been conclusively proven. There had been books written about the disappearance of Percy Fawcett, and a movie titled The Lost City of Z came out in 2016. However, this isn't the end of the story. For most of the century, following his disappearance, mainstream archaeology treated Fawcett's underlying premise as a romantic fantasy. While they may not have come right out and said it, he was considered a bit of a crackpot.

Starting point is 00:08:05 The prevailing scholarly model, sometimes called the counterfeit paradise thesis, held that Amazonian soils were too poor and the ecology too fragile to sustain large, complex, sedentary populations, and that any sizable pre-Columbian settlements the Spanish had reported were either exaggerations or the product of societies that collapsed too quickly to leave a durable mark. That consensus has since eroded dramatically over the last 25 years, and it now seems that Percy Fawcett might have actually been on to something. The instrument most responsible for the theory's collapse is LIDAR, a laser-based remote sensing technology that can be flown over dense forest canopy and still resolve the ground surface beneath it with remarkable precision.

Starting point is 00:08:57 It has detected features that otherwise can't be detected by the naked eye due to forest cover. Lighter evidence now shows that large portions of Amazonia were inhabited by substantial organized societies that deliberately reshape their environment. That being said, there was probably no single Amazonian civilization that was comparable to, say, the Roman Empire, or the Maya. Instead, different regions develop distinct forms of settlement, ranging from large villages to interconnected urban landscapes with roads, plazas, canals, and engineered soils. The Amazon presents an enormous archaeological problem because most traditional archaeological evidence is difficult to see. Stone is not plentiful in many parts of the Amazon basin,

Starting point is 00:09:46 so Amazonian societies generally built with earth, timber, and other organic materials. A monumental wooden building can disappear almost completely within a few centuries, whereas a stone period may remain obvious for thousands of years. And at the same time, abandoned settlements are rapidly swallowed by vegetation. Consequently, a former town containing thousands of inhabitants can appear today to just be an ordinary rainforest. forest. One of the earliest recognized examples of a complex Amazonian society came from Marajo Island, near the mouth of the Amazon. The Marjoara culture flourished roughly between the years 400 and 1,300. Archaeologists discovered enormous artificial earthen mounds, some of which supported

Starting point is 00:10:33 settlements and ceremonial structures. These inhabitants produced exceptionally elaborate painted and in size ceramics as well. The mounds were partially, responses to seasonal flooding. Rather than allowing the environment to dictate where people could live, inhabitants physically elevated parts of the landscape. Marajo provided an early indication that Amazonian peoples were capable of major landscape engineering. The most striking connection to Fawcett came from an archaeological work led by anthropologist Michael Heckenberger, working closely with the Kokuro people in the Upper Jenga River, a tributary of the Amazon. This was a remarkably close to the general region where Fawcett believed the city of Z existed.

Starting point is 00:11:19 Researchers discovered the remains of large interconnected settlements that were occupied roughly between the years 800 and 1600. These settlements had large central plazas, substantial roads, bridges, ditches, defensive structures, and planned layouts. Some roads were extraordinarily wide. Rather than a single enormous metropolis comparable to Rome or Tenochietland, the evidence points towards a network of smaller settlements integrated across a deliberately managed landscape. A study published just weeks before this episode was recorded indicates that a single part of the southwestern Amazon may have had more than 20,000 pre-colonial earthworks based on extensive LIDAR coverage. Previous estimates placed the total number of earthworks in the entire

Starting point is 00:12:07 Amazon at just 10,000. So while there is evidence of large-scale settlements in the Amazon, the big question still remains. How did they manage to engage in agriculture, given the problems with the soil in the region? Amazonian peoples appear to have overcome the challenges of poor soils through a combination of techniques rather than relying on conventional field agriculture. The most important was the creation of TerraPretta, or Black Earth. People reportedly added charcoal, ash, food waste, bones, pottery fragments, and organic matter to the soil, producing unusually fertile ground that retain nutrients far better than normal Amazonian soils. It was basically an early form of composting.

Starting point is 00:12:55 They also relied heavily on crops suited to tropical conditions, especially Maniac or Casava, which can grow in relatively nutrient-poor soils. In flood-prone regions, they built raised fields and drainage canals, while communities along major rivers exploited naturally fertile floodplain soils that were replenished by sediment. Agriculture was also integrated with agroforestry. Rather than completely clearing the forest, people cultivated useful trees, palms, fruits, nuts, and other plants alongside gardens. Shifting cultivation allowed plots to recover between periods of farming. It's also highly likely that the people,

Starting point is 00:13:34 in the Amazon were highly dependent on obtaining food from rivers. Communities developed sophisticated techniques involving nets, traps, hooks, and the seasonal exploitation of migrating fish. And these societies also built massive water control systems. This included canals, ditches, waterways, reservoirs, and ponds. They were built for agriculture, transportation, and flood control. So, returning to the original point of this episode, we have to ask the question, was person Fawcett, right? And the answer is, sort of. There almost certainly wasn't a large urban area with a dense population. There was no literal lost city of Z. However, the idea that there was a complex society in the Amazon capable of agriculture has proven true. The Amazon likely

Starting point is 00:14:25 contained millions of people who deliberately engineered soils, built roads, managed forests, and created extensive networks of settlements. There's still a lot we don't know about the people who lived in the Amazon. However, now at least we have an idea of where to look. There might be things we never learn because the Amazonian people mostly used organic material like wood, which doesn't preserve well. As for Percy Fawcett himself,

Starting point is 00:14:51 we still have no clue what really happened to him, and we probably never will. But whatever happened to him and his team, I'm sure he'd be glad to know that he was mostly right and his critics were wrong. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon.

Starting point is 00:15:16 Your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups, you two can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.