2005 Winter Quarterly Meeting ~ Nov 12, 2005
Finding the Lost City of Z
by Jack Burgess
It reads like a Who's Who of modern exploration and
adventure, as the author drops the names of real and fictitious people in this story of the
search for the lost cities of the Amazon. Yet, they all belong in the narrative: El Dorado;
Ian Fleming; Indiana Jones; Orlando Villas Boas, and more.
In "The Lost City of Z: A Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon,"
The New Yorker, September 19, 2005, reporter-at-large David Grann, plunges into the
heart of Brazil's Mato Grosso region in the latest of a hundred or more attempts to find out
what happened to Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, the famous British explorer who disappeared
in thejungle in 1925, and to try his hand at the mystery of the fabled lost cities for which
Fawcett was searching.
Gran is no armchair explorer. Like Fawcett and the others who have dared the
"green hell," he endures suffocating heat and humidity, wades infested swamps waist deep, is
deserted by his Indian guides, and is threatened by the bows and arrows of those who don't
want him there. His adventure, undertaken in February 2005, benefits initially from roads,
modern vehicles, and global positioning devices, but then has to carry his computer and his
supplies, at time alone and through unknown waters.
What he finds is worth it. Along the Xingu River he meets archaeologist
Michael Heckenberger from the University of Florida. Heckenberger tells of a decade of work
in the region and his astonishing discoveries: The remains of twenty-nine ancient villages,
two or three miles apart, each village surrounded by a moat 12 to 16 feet deep and 50 feet
wide. Heckenberger estimates the population of each village to have been two to five thousand,
with the total population of the larger community rivaling European cities of the time. The
villages themselves were laid out in concentric circles, somewhat in the fashion of those at
Poverty Point, Louisianna. Heckenberger has described his work in Science, "Amazonia
1492: Pristine Forest or Cultural Parkland?" and in his book The Ecology of Power."
Other scholars, including University of Illinois archeologist Anna Roosevelt,
great granddaughter of Theodore, are at work in the Mato Grosso. Roosevelt believes the area
has been settled for about 11,000 years, and geologists "have uncovered so much black earth
from ancient settlements that they now believe the Amazon may have sustained millions of
people." Donald Lathap believes that the Amazon may have been the "wellspring of high
civilization throughout the Americas."
Grann's essay---over twenty pages long in the New Yorker--has received a
strong response,m so he's now expanding it to book lenght. Good news for all of us interested
in this subject. And what happened to Colonel Fawcett: Three different Indian tribes--the
Kalapalo, the Kuikuro, and the Suyas--said essentially the same thing, with each blaming
another tribe: He was killed. And though his ring and some of his possessions have been found,
no incontrobertible remains have been recovered. To the Indians he was apparently just
another intruder, not wanted and not bearing gifts. Grann himself had to produce several
hundred dollars worth of gooods and promises of more to get himself rescued when it looked as
if his own lunck might have run out. Lucky for us he survived to tell this important and
fascinating tale.
2005 Spring Quarterly Meeting ~ Apr 23, 2005
The Summer Quarterly
Meeting proved to be one of the best meetings
for some time, with guest speaker Joseph Wilson (an instructor in Anthropology in the
Department of Political
and Social Sciences at Lander University, Greenwood, SC) giving a well-presented talk on
DNA Evidence for Central Asians in America, which offers strong support for much of
Ethel Stewart's writings of the Indian origin-lore of the Canadian Northwest Dene and Na-Dene
peoples. He touched on sand paintings, the Asian compound bow and the first appearance
of trousers being among these people.
to the general public and vandalism, as evidenced by the defacing of
the first inscription line on the Decalog Stone.
Later developments of the cross became stylized into circle crosses and swastikas
representing both circular movement and diretion of movement particularly in regard to
the diurnal motion of the sun and the seasonal motion of the stars and planets around the
axis. The swastika may have developed from the serpentine application to the cross as John
White suggests. Hermes caduceus may represent a serpentine cross wound up taut around a
central axis. Neptune and Triton carried a trident that may have represented the world
pillar with cross arms bent upward like the brances of a tree.
