Currently in its eighth week on The New York Times Best Seller List, author David Grann's The Lost City of Z chronicles generations of Amazon exploration with a particular focus on the ill-fated expedition of the legendary Percy Harrison Fawcett. The British explorer, his son Jack, and friend Raleigh Rimell entered the jungle in 1925 and never returned.

While The Lost City of Z is an armchair adventure page-turner, it also explores a complex and controversial anthropological question — was the Amazon once home to large, sophisticated civilizations or has the harsh environment of the jungle always offered a 'counterfeit paradise' where mankind can scarcely grab a foothold.

Michael Heckenberger, a 1988 graduate of UVM, and the late James Petersen, a 1979 alumnus and anthropology professor, have been two of the strongest voices posing the theory and offering proof that large civilizations once flourished in the Amazon. The two anthropologists collaborated on Amazon research, a relationship that began when Petersen taught Heckenberger at UVM.

"Jim is an infectious person and teacher," Heckenberger said in an article in the spring 2005 edition of Vermont Quarterly magazine. "He attracts so many people to anthropology. He is without a doubt one of the most powerful and influential teachers I had."

Grann communicated with Petersen as he researched the book and planned his own journey into the jungle. In the acknowledgments, he writes: "I would like to pay special tribute to James Peterson, who was murdered in the Amazon not long after we spoke, depriving the world of one of its finest archaeologists and most generous souls."

Grann's meeting with Heckenberger, a professor at the University of Florida, appears in the book's final chapter. Seeking clues to Fawcett's fate, the author treks to a Kuikuru village deep in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil. There he meets Heckenberger, who lives with the tribe as he continues his research. Heckenberger walks the journalist around, shows him the evidence that supports the presence of an advanced civilization from the past. "To tell you the honest-to-God truth. I don't think there is anywhere in the world where there isn't written history where the continuity is so clear as right here," Heckenberger tells Grann.

Read more about alumnus Michael Heckenberger and the late James Petersen's Amazonian research in the spring 2005 issue of Vermont Quarterly.