El Dorado

From The Sunday Times

January 10, 2010

Google Earth helps find El Dorado

For nearly 500 years, explorers have hunted in vain for a lost city— now with Google Earth, it may have been found

Ed Caesar

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Geometric shapes dug into the earth were first noticed by a Finnish archeologist flying over the Amazon. The shapes are made up of a series of trenches topped by banks and connected by a network of straight roads. The geometric shapes are thought to be the remains of roads, bridges. moats and squares: the basis for a civilisation spanning 155 miles.

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Since the time of the conquistadors, the legend of an ancient, lost civilisation deep in the Amazon forest has beguiled hundreds of explorers and led many to their deaths. Some called their dream El Dorado. Others, most notably Colonel Percy Fawcett, the gloriously moustached British explorer (and real-life model for Indiana Jones) named it the City of Z. But no one has ever returned from the Amazon with conclusive proof that such a place existed.

Three scientists have now come close to doing just that. The journal Antiquity has published a report showing more than 200 massive earthworks in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil’s border with Bolivia. From the sky it looks as if a series of geometric figures has been carved into the earth, but the archeologists and historians who published the report believe these shapes are the remains of roads, bridges, moats, avenues and squares that formed the basis for a sophisticated civilisation spanning 155 miles, which could have supported a population of 60,000. The remains date from AD200 to 1283.