The Lost City of Z

News media have been abuzz the last week with reports on an article recently published in Antiquity on monumental earthworks in the Amazon. In the article, Martti Parssinen, Denise Schaan, and Alceu Ranzi discuss the geoglyphs they found in Amazonian highlands. My dad sent me an article from AOL news (can you believe people still use AOL?) and David Grann of the New Yorker found one at Times Online. Grann himself has written a book (and various New Yorker articles) on the site of these discoveries, the "Lost City of Z." Grann's book, published a year ago, traces the history of men who lost their lives in quest of this mysterious civilization. Percy Fawcett, a British geographer, was the first in the series, and when he disappeared with his son and colleague in 1925, probably at the hands of hostile or defensive natives, several other adventurers braved the wild forest to uncover his bones. The story is exciting and terrifying, and it left Times with an incentive to dub Fawcett "the British Indiana Jones."

For such an exciting subject matter, the Times article leaves something to be desired. First of all, the sensationalism of Fawcett's quest should have worn out by now, and needn't be the basis of reports that should be about the ecology of the civilization itself. But more appallingly, the Times' reporter is so fixated on the notion of an Edenic, pristine past, that he contradicts himself in his writing. Though the writer claims that "Z" was an enormous and complex civilization, which required serious modification in the landscape (it was in the Amazon, after all), he seems to think that deforestation is counterproductive to our understanding of Z. The subtitle of his article reads: "The newly discovered rainforest civilization shows that deforestation is not just vandalism but a crime against history." ...What?

Pärssinen et al. explicitly state that "In the last 30 years,...areas once believed to be pristine forest began to be cleared for the cattle industry. In their new treeless, savanna-like landscape, the ancient earthen structures became visible, especially from the sky." As harmful to biodiversity as deforestation is, the ancient city would not have been found if trees hadn't been cleared. Maybe it was an editor who wrote the Times subtitle, but it's still irresponsible journalism.