January 12, 2010

Aerial Photos of the 'Lost City of Z'

Last summer in "The Primeval Rain Forest, Not" I mentioned Michael Heckenger, the anthropologist interviewed by David Gann in The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon.

Heckenberger described finding traces on the ground of larger towns, field, causeways, and water-control structures used when the population of the area must have been larger.

Now aerial photos are showing more and more what he meant.

Note: It's a funny linguistic tic that we use "El Dorado" or "Eldorado" to mean a place, when in the original Spanish it meant a person: The Golden One, the fabled king of the fabled city somewhere off in the interior of South America.

1 comment:

LSP said...

Its an incredible find - Fawcett was remarkable too. I'd like to think he found Z, but who knows?