Having recently seen the movie, I'm wondering what it would take for the Lost City of Z to be everything Percy Fawcett hoped it would be.
His impression of the city was based on ceramic pottery he discovered on his first expedition to the Amazon. This and a 18th century Portuguese manuscript which descibed a ruin of a stone city with an arch, a statue, and hieroglyphs in the area the natives told him about a great city made him believe this was the inspiration for El Dorado. It seems he was convinced he would find a city similiar to Machu Picchu or Olmec ruins, which he and his son would die searching for.
In recent years archeologists have unearthed evidence of large scale human settlement in the area. Ironically the largest of which was the location where Fawcett first discovered ceramic. The site is now called Kuhikugu, one of about two dozen towns and villages that existed for over a thousand years before the arrival of Old World disease. The region was home to about 50,000 people and Kuhikugu, along with other sites had wooden palisades, defensive ditches, roads, public plaza, dams, canoe canals, terra preta cassava fields, fruit orchards and possibly fish farms. There was no stone buidlings or writing however. Certainly nothing of the grandeur of more famous native American cities.
So what would it take for the Portuguese account and Fawcett's expectations to be correct? One of the things I don't quite understand is why cassava was the staple of local diet and not the more nutritious sweet potato, which they seemed to have had. Also my research seem to indicate the natives did not have domesticated animals at all, including the Muscovy duck which is native to the Amazon and first domesticated probably in Peru in 700-800 BC, a thousand years earlier than the Turkey for example. The Muscovy duck seem a perfect fit for Amazonia. They produce eggs, meat, high quality fertilizer, and they are used today for their ability to hunt flies and other insects.
We know today that indigenous agriculture supported far more people in the Amazon than previously believed, but it seems to me the available agriculture package was not fully exploited.
