Mirage de el Dorado Complex Civilizations? By Robert Bruce Drynan
O
n 13 August 2005 two scholars, Eduardo Neves, a Brazilian, and James Peterson, Anthropology Department chairman at the University of Vermont, visited a roadside restaurant in the Amazon jungle. Two gunmen walked in and demanded their money. As a departing afterthought, one shot the American in the abdomen. Peterson died before Neves could get him to a hospital. It was a terrible irony, because Peterson was the man about to bring the true El Dorado to the attention of the world. What he and his colleagues had identified bore no resemblance to the shiny monetary metal, but it may very well offer greater benefit humanity than mere gold. During Francisco Orellana’s voyage down the Amazon River in 1542 seeking the legendary city of El Dorado, chronicler Gaspar de Carvajal, a Dominican friar, described densely populated settlements along the river’s banks, especially after the explorers had arrived at the confluence with the Río Negro, near present-day Manaos. The treasure awaiting the twenty-first century discovery was staring them in
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El Ojo del Lago / June 2022
the face, but it was black, not golden. When Orellana returned a few years later, he found no sign of the settlements described in his earlier adventures. Attacked by indigenous warriors, Orellana was killed. Later adventurers and modern scientists exploring the river found no sign of the populations described by Carvajal and Orellana and dismissed the original accounts as exaggeration or fantasy. Scientists have argued that as lush as the rain forest growth is, it occupies extremely poor soils. Tropical flooding and rains leach the nutrients that might accrue in the soils. Such conditions could not support dense sedentary agricultural populations, only small groups of primitive stone-age hunter-gatherers. However, there is good reason to believe that the area where Orellana met his end is the large (15,500 square miles) Amazon estuary island of Marajó. Modern anthropological research has concluded that the Marajó Island supported a substantial sedentary culture, perhaps as great as 100,000 inhabitants that probably succumbed to disease brought by Orellana’s first
