The Lost City of Z
David Grann
February 2009
The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is a 2009 nonfiction book by David Grann. It recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared with his son in the Amazon rainforest in 1925 while looking for the ancient "Lost City of Z" or "El Dorado." In the book, Grann recounts his own journey into the Amazon, where he discovers new evidence about how Fawcett may have died.
For decades explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of Fawcett's party and of the Lost City of Z. Grann, a New Yorker staff writer at the time, first wrote about Fawcett in 2005. The article documents how Grann, working from Fawcett's long-lost diaries, reconstructed the explorer's last journey, including visiting the Kalapalo tribe in the Xingu Indigenous Park region of the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. The Kalapalo had preserved an oral history about Fawcett's small party of himself, his son Jack, and Jack's friend Raleigh Rimell, who were among the first Europeans the tribe had ever seen.
As a result of Grann's own trek into the Amazon and consultations with archeologists, evidence of wooden structures and roads that cut through the jungle were uncovered. As well as Black Earth (Terra preta) that showed evidence humans had added supplements to the soil to increase its fertility to support agriculture. Grann's work provides evidence that civilization across the Atlantic had been far more advanced than European conquerors and historians have led us to believe while taking you on a thrilling ride through exploration during the first quarter of the 20th century.
Editors Note: Grann's book emphasizes just how little we know about the world we live in today. The era of Columbus and "New World" colonization has fed modern society with a multitude of misconceptions regarding what existed and thrived prior to European dominance in South America. Unpacking historical and cultural misconceptions such as these is critical to understanding how we move forward as human beings and nations in the future.