Exploration Fawcett

I've just finished reading a book called "The Lost city of Z" by David Grann, about Colonel Percy Fawcett's search for a city reputed to be in the heart of the Amazon jungle. Fawcett was called the last of the Victorian explorers although he was active during the early years of last century. He was  physically tough, morally upright and totally obsessed with finding the truth of the many stories and legends about the existence of a large city/civilisation in the Amazon basin. He made several expeditions to the Amazon jungle, but disappeared in 1925, on an expedition with his eldest son Jack. Over the years there have been many searchers and many theories about what happened to Fawcett and his son, but the ultimate truth will probably never be known. His second son, Brian, searched for them in 1953, without success, and wrote a compilation of his father's papers, publishing them under the title "Exploration Fawcett" which was something of a sensation at the time. I read it when I was probably about 12 or 13; it was in a load of old Book Club books that someone gave to my Dad (along with "Seven years in Tibet" and "The long walk", both great adventure books). I was fascinated; it was very Indiana Jones, a combination of archaeology and exploration that greatly appealed to me.
    Grann's book doesn't really add much to what is already known, and wanders about a bit, but it's readable. The only really interesting part is at the very end, where the prevalent idea that the Amazon basin could not have supported a large civilisation is firmly knocked on the head.  What interested me was the idea that archaeologists were looking for the wrong things when they searched for a 'civilisation", envisaging monolithic built structures of stone, pyramids, temples and such, similar to the civilisations of Central America and Peru. They looked for vertical structures. But the Amazonian cities were horizontal in emphasis; plazas, roadways, bridges and moats. And of course, there's very little stone in the area. It's all alluvial and covered in forest, so structures were made of wood, which doesn't last. So what you're looking for might be there all the time, but is not recognized by you because your mindset tells you you're looking for something else.
PS. The archaeologist whose work is rewriting the story of civilisation in the Amazon is Michael Heckenberger. Google him, he's interesting.