That they broke off, traveled down river.............the Amazon originates in Peru and empties into the Atlantic.............the Parana............empties into the Atlantic as well.........but much more South........at Buenos Aires, Argentina in fact........which is why Fawcett was in SW Brazil..........by the descriptions of going down river.........cinnamon trees, etc.........

Small World

Carvajal’s tale appeared fantastic. His claims of extensive human habitation and societies organised on more than a village level seemed fanciful. Some, like American archaeologist Betty Meggers (1921-2012), didn’t believe that the nutrient poor, acidic oxisols (soils) could support more than the minimum recycling of nutrients required to sustain an unchanging fetid equilibrium. In Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise, published in 1971, she was unequivocal: there just wasn’t enough resources to sustain agriculture, significant population densities or social organisation beyond that of the “pop-up” hunter-gatherer village.

From A to Z

The Amazon has always been a good place to disappear. Colonel Percy Fawcett, an eccentric British adventurer and surveyor, vanished in 1925 in search of the Lost City of Z, a latter-day El Dorado thought to be somewhere on the Upper Xingu in Mato Grosso. The jungle lived up to its reputation. Fawcett is thought to have misread Manuscript 512, housed at the National Library of Rio De Janeiro by Portuguese explorer (bandeirante) João da Silva Guimarães, who claimed to have visited a ruined city in the sertão (outback or hinterland) of Bahia (not Mato Grosso) in 1753.

In his book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon (2009), Michael Grann claims that Fawcett was really onto something. The archaeological site of Kuhikugu on the Xingu shows evidence of defensive ditches, pallisades, huge plazas (one of which is 490 feet across), canals and roads. Other evidence that the Amazon basin wasn’t as wild as it is now comes in the form of work by Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian geographer, who discovered geoglyphs, roads and large-scale encampments, when flying over the deforested areas of Acre, the lowland Brazilian state which abuts the frontier with Peru.

Terra Preta

The presence of terra preta (black earth), nutrient-rich anthropogenic soils (high in nitrogen, phosphorus, calcium, zinc, manganese etc.) on the Amazon and some of its major tributaries, has come as something of a surprise and has led to a re-appraisal of Carvajal’s account. Perhaps the large-scale tribal confederations and settlements that stretched hundreds of leagues weren’t merely a figment of a fertile imagination after all. What is evident from the distribution of these soils, is how well it matches those places described by Carvajal, namely the territories of the Aparia, Machiparo, Omagua, Picotas and Amazons. As for most of the rest of the Amazon basin, Megger’s view still holds.