Archaeologists today are much more impressed by the presence of these artifacts. Fawcett does note finding pottery sherds in his memoirs, but he seems to have been little impressed by them. In the film Fawcett uses these pieces of pottery to pronounce that the Amazon must have once been home to larger populations, and he is shown bravely fighting establishment figures back in London who refuse to believe the rainforest could have been home to such a civilization.

In the movie The Lost City of Z, directed by James Gray, it is suggested that Fawcett’s belief in Z was inspired by the discovery of broken pieces of pottery found in the jungle. In short, his memoirs are fun to read but full of many claims that are difficult to substantiate today. Throughout the pages of this book, he tells many fantastical stories about the things he saw, or heard about, in the jungle, including: numerous anacondas measuring 60 feet and longer, 1 birds who could peck through stones by first plucking a special leaf, and strange human-like hairy beasts. Percy Fawcett’s memoir, Exploration Fawcett, was written after years of working as a surveyor in the Amazon. If the city was so elusive, how did Fawcett come to believe in its existence, and should we be trying to follow him down the jungle paths? To a more skeptical eye, this starts to look like an unfalsifiable hypothesis. After years of searching for Z without luck, Fawcett wrote in his memoirs that “to hear tales of an ancient city in the vicinity of certain Indians, and then to find that nothing of the sort exists, must not be taken as evidence that the traditions have no grounding in fact.” That is to say, no matter how many times he failed to find the city, he would not (or could not) lose faith that Z was somewhere out there. Lost cities are funny places belief in their existence only seems to increase when no one can find them. He had come to believe that the City of Z had been a refuge for people fleeing the destruction of the lost continent of Atlantis and that their wisdom could still be found in the halls of Z. Instead, Fawcett wanted to find a great storehouse of knowledge. Fawcett sought for the City of Z with an even greater furor then the conquistadors who had come before him, but he was not seeking wealth. These men were driven by desires of wealth and fortune. In the first installment of the Lore of Lost Cities, we followed Spanish explorers as they traversed the great Amazon basin in search of the fabled city of El Dorado.

The lost city of z book