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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
For decades, his theory was dismissed as fantasy. Modern archaeology, however, has begun finding evidence that he may have been onto something.
Learn more about Percy Fawcett and the Lost City of Z on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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 sent 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. He proved himself extraordinarily capable in the field, enduring conditions that broke other men, and he returned from the Amazon convinced that the received wisdom about the region 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 his conviction that mainstream assumptions were entirely mistaken.
Stories of lost civilizations had circulated for centuries. When Spanish expeditions penetrated the continent in the sixteenth 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.
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. 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 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 Gaspar de Carvajal, who accompanied Francisco de Orellana down the Amazon in 1541-42, described settlements that seemed 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 eighteenth-century account attributed to a Portuguese expedition that claimed to have stumbled upon a ruined stone city complete with arched gateways, statues, and inscriptions in an unknown script.
Fawcett folded this account together with older Indigenous testimony and centuries legends about El Dorado. From these threads he constructed his target, which he referred to in his surveying notes simply as “Z,” most likely intending it as a working label for a set of coordinates.
He believed Z lay somewhere in the Xingu River basin of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state.
Fawcett mounted several expeditions into the region over the following two decades, interrupted by his service in the First World War, where he commanded artillery on the Western Front and was decorated for his conduct at the Battle of the Somme.
By the mid-1920s, funded partly by a newspaper syndicate and partly by his own reputation as the era’s foremost authority on the unmapped Amazon, he organized what would be his final attempt.
In April 1925 he set out from the city of Cuiabá with his elder son Jack and Jack’s close friend Raleigh Rimell, 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, sent by a native runner in late May 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 Rimell was ever found.
The disappearance became one of the twentieth century’s enduring mysteries and spawned a small industry of rescue attempts, rumor, 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;
- 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;
- 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-Bôas reported recovering human bones that Indigenous informants suggested might be Fawcett’s. Some observers became convinced that the remains finally solved the mystery. Fawcett’s family was skeptical. Later analysis indicated that the bones did not match what was known of Percy Fawcett’s physical characteristics.
None has ever been conclusively proven. There have been books written about the disappearance of Percy Fawcett, and a movie titled The Lost City of Z came out in 2016.
However, this wasn’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 might not have come right out and said it, he was considered a bit of a crackpot.
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 exaggeration or the product of societies that collapsed too quickly to leave a durable mark.
That consensus has eroded dramatically over the last twenty-five 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. It has detected features that otherwise can’t be detected by the naked eye due to forest cover.
Lidar evidence now shows that large portions of Amazonia were inhabited by substantial, organized societies that deliberately reshaped their environment. There was probably no single Amazonian civilization comparable to the Roman Empire or the Maya.
Instead, different regions developed 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, so Amazonian societies generally built with earth, timber, and other organic materials.
A monumental wooden building can disappear almost completely within centuries, whereas a stone pyramid remains obvious for thousands of years.
At the same time, abandoned settlements are rapidly swallowed by vegetation. Consequently, a former town containing thousands of inhabitants can appear today to be ordinary rainforest.
One of the earliest recognized examples of complex Amazonian society came from Marajó Island, near the mouth of the Amazon. The Marajoara culture flourished roughly between 400 and 1300.
Archaeologists discovered enormous artificial earthen mounds, some of which supported settlements and ceremonial structures. The inhabitants produced exceptionally elaborate painted and incised ceramics.
The mounds were partly responses to seasonal flooding. Rather than allowing the environment to dictate where people could live, inhabitants physically elevated parts of the landscape.
Marajó provided an early indication that Amazonian peoples were capable of major landscape engineering.
The most striking connection to Fawcett came from archaeological work led by anthropologist Michael Heckenberger, working closely with the Kuikuro people in the Upper Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon..
This was remarkably close to the general region where Fawcett believed Z existed. Researchers discovered the remains of large, interconnected settlements that were occupied between roughly 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 Tenochtitlan, the evidence points toward networks 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 might have more than 20,000 precolonial earthworks, based on extensive lidar coverage. Previous estimates placed the total number of earthworks in the entire 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 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 terra preta, or “black earth.” People repeatedly added charcoal, ash, food waste, bones, pottery fragments, and organic matter to the soil, producing unusually fertile ground that retained nutrients far better than normal Amazonian soils. It was basically an early form of composting.
They also relied heavily on crops suited to tropical conditions, especially manioc, or cassava, 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 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 is also highly likely that people 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.
These societies also built massive water control systems. This included canals, ditches, causeways, reservoirs, and ponds. These were built for agriculture, transportation, and flood control.
So, returning to the original point of this episode, was Percy Fawcett right?
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 contained millions of people who deliberately engineered soils, built roads, managed forests, and created extensive networks of settlements.
There is still a lot we don’t know about the people who lived in the Amazon. However, we now at least 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, we still have no clue what happened to him and we probably never will. 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.