mairamartins

Wow. We begin in 1925 with Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett's descent into the Amazon, Mato Grosso region, with his 21-year-old son, Jack, and Jack's friend, Rawley. They were trekking in search of what Fawcett termed "The Lost City of Z." Z, it turns out, is another name for the chimeric city of El Dorado. And it's not ruining anything to say that by the book's end, the author, with a verbal flourish or two, presents that city to the reader. This book is nothing short of jaw-dropping. The revelations about Z would be too fantastic to believe, if David Grann weren't a reporter for The New Yorker, repository of truth and light; but he is. So you can believe. Also, as a tiny side note, the introduction of Michael Heckenberger, rockstar archeologist (http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/mheckenb/), at /Lost City of Z/'s end, feels a little like encountering David Foster Wallace, if Wallace had chosen archeology as a career instead of writing. I'm still sad about DFW's death, so this was a nice surprise. Heckenberger's specialty is the Amazon's Upper Xingu region, about which, and please forgive the dense scholar-ese of the quote (which is worth parsing, because what's mentioned here is nothing short of revolutionary): "The archaeology of pre-Columbian polities in the Amazon River basin forces a reconsideration of early urbanism and long-term change in tropical forest landscapes. We describe settlement and land-use patterns of complex societies on the eve of European contact (after 1492) in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon. These societies were organized in articulated clusters, representing small independent polities, within a regional peer polity. These patterns constitute a "galactic" form of prehistoric urbanism, sharing features with small-scale urban polities in other areas. Understanding long-term change in coupled human-environment systems relating to these societies has implications for conservation and sustainable development, notably to control ecological degradation and maintain regional biodiversity." What Heckenberger's talking about, and what /Lost City of Z/ reveals, is evidence that complex societies, populated by millions, existed in the Amazon nearly 4500 years ago. Their understanding of astronomy and engineering rivals that of the Egyptians. Read and enjoy!

2022-11-14 13:48