![\"\"](\"http:\/\/i.telegraph.co.uk\/telegraph\/multimedia\/archive\/00645\/news-graphics-2007-_645744a.jpg\")
Douglas Eugene “Gene” Savoy (May 11, 1927-September 11, 2007)<\/p>\nDouglas Eugene “Gene” Savoy (May 11, 1927-September 11, 2007)<\/p>\n
Gene Savoy was perhaps the most successful South American explorer of his generation and certainly the most controversial. <\/strong><\/p>\n His discovery of \u2018Old Vilcabamba\u2019 at Esp\u00edritu Pampa in 1964 was the most important find of an Inca site since Hiram Bingham stumbled on Machu Picchu in 1911.<\/strong><\/p>\n For Savoy surmised and other historians have since validated that the site at Esp\u00edritu Pampa was the great lost city of the Incas, the so-called \u2018Old Vilcabamba\u2019 deep in the jungle where they retreated in their final days after the Spanish Conquest.\u00a0\u00a0It was the site Hiram Bingham himself had been looking for when he stumbled inadvertently on Machu Picchu instead.\u00a0\u00a0In locating it, Savoy built directly on Hiram Bingham\u2019s earlier exploration.\u00a0 Ironically, Bingham had found a small Inca settlement in almost precisely the same place fifty years earlier and dismissed it as being too insubstantial for the lost city of Old Vilcabamba he was searching for – and so not looked any further.\u00a0<\/p>\n If ever there was an example of how explorers can never overcome their own preconceptions, this was it.\u00a0 The site Bingham found didn\u2019t fit with his romantic vision of what such a lost city should look like.\u00a0 Machu Picchu on the other hand could have been designed by a Hollywood art director, albeit one with exceptional talent.\u00a0 So Bingham twisted himself into intellectual contortions to try to prove, against all the evidence, that Machu Picchu itself must have been Old Vilcabamba, the \u2018Last City of the Incas\u2019, simply because it looked better.<\/p>\n Savoy pressed further into the surrounding jungle beyond Bingham\u2019s initial discovery and found out quite how extensive the site really was, despite being bitten by a bushmaster snake and receiving a denuncia<\/em>, a formal indictment, from the local community for presumed grave-robbing.\u00a0<\/p>\n Esp\u00edritu Pampa was just the first of Savoy\u2019s extraordinary finds.<\/strong>\u00a0 He went on to explore further in the Chachapoyas area to the north of Peru.\u00a0 Here he found first Gran Pajat\u00e9n in 1965 and then, much later, Gran Vilaya in 1985, two equally remarkable sites.\u00a0 Gran Pajat\u00e9n was an impressive citadel, while Gran Vilaya was a complex of thousands of buildings which Savoy could claim with some justification as being the capital of the Chachapoyan empire.<\/p>\n Yet along with this dizzying series of discoveries, unmatched since the time of Hiram Bingham himself, came a taste for publicity and diffusionist claims which led the archaeological world to disown him.<\/p>\n .<\/strong><\/p>\n Douglas Eugene “Gene” Savoy\u00a0 was born on May 11 1927 in Bellingham, Washington<\/strong>.\u00a0 In his autobiography, Antisuyo<\/em>, he says:\u00a0 \u2018Men dream of adventure and I am no exception.\u00a0 I cannot remember not wanting to be an explorer.\u00a0 I hated school when I was a boy.\u2019 So after the failure of both his first marriage and business, he moved to Peru in the 1960s where he quickly attracted attention for his buccaneering charm and ability to attract wealthy sponsors for his increasingly ambitious expeditions.<\/p>\n In 1962 he moved with a new wife to Yungay, a town in Northern Peru\u2019s Cordillera Blanca.\u00a0 Tragedy struck.\u00a0 It was an area prone to landslides and a bad one engulfed the town:\u00a0 Savoy and his family survived the earthquake but his young son, Jamil, died in the epidemic that followed.<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n By now Savoy had fallen under the influence of the Peruvian archaeologist, Julio Tello, who had promoted a site called Chav\u00edn de Hu\u00e1ntar as the centre of the earliest Peruvian culture then known, that of the Chav\u00edn (c 1200 – 200 BC).\u00a0 What intrigued Savoy about Tello\u2019s theories was the idea that the Chav\u00edn (and by implication all the later Andean cultures) had their origins in the East, in the jungle.\u00a0 Tello had based this idea on the images of jaguars and serpents he saw carved on a great stelae at Chav\u00edn.\u00a0 The assumption of most archaeologists, swayed perhaps by the Incas\u2019 own creation myths, had always been to assume a mountain origin for both them and their Andean predecessors.<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n The central driving idea behind all Savoy\u2019s exploring in the succeeding years<\/strong> was to show that the jungle was not on the fringes of Peruvian culture but at its very centre.\u00a0 It was what led him later to his obsessive search into the Chachapoyas, which he saw as essentially another jungle culture overlooked by academics more concerned with the mountains (the area of Chachapoyas lies between the two).\u00a0 When he travelled down towards Esp\u00edritu Pampa from the Andes it was not, as Bingham had done, with a sense of mild regret at what the Incas might finally have come to \u2013 instead he saw Manco Inca as having proudly led his troops down to Old Vilcabamba as a \u2018symbolic\u2019 return to the ancestral homeland.\u00a0 Savoy postulated: \u2018Was his [Manco\u2019s] cry, \u201cback to the place of origin from whence we will re-build and re-conquer\u201d?\u2019\u00a0 Savoy, unlike Bingham, actually wanted to find the \u2018last city of the Incas\u2019 in the jungle.<\/p>\n As if being both the most successful Andean explorer since the war was not enough for one man, Savoy also evolved a parallel career as a high-profile yachtsman.\u00a0 After sailing reed-boats across Lake Titicaca in the 1960s, he later set out on another sea-faring adventure around the world, this time in a seventy foot mahogany catamaran with two carved Mochica dragons as prows.\u00a0 On the stern of the boat were a pair of Cadillac fins.\u00a0<\/p>\n There was a reason for these ocean voyages.<\/strong>\u00a0 Savoy had decided, like Thor Heyerdahl before him (and Heyerdahl had also lived in Northern Peru), that the answer to questions of cultural origin lay in possible transoceanic crossings between civilisations and that the only way to really prove this was to do it yourself.\u00a0<\/p>\n Archaeologists like to tar Savoy with the diffusionist brush\u00a0 (the idea that the advanced ancient cultures of each continent must have influenced each other, or at least evolved from some lost meta-culture, Atlantis being the usual contender).\u00a0 But Savoy\u2019s main point was not about trans-Atlantic crossings \u2013 rather he thought it inconceivable that there had been no commercial connection between the highly consumerist pre-Columbian civilisations of the South, around present-day Peru, and those of Central America such as the Nahuatl (the Aztecs) and the Maya.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0In 1969 Savoy tried to demonstrate the contact between these two areas of civilisation by setting off from the coast of Peru in a historically accurate tortora reed raft he called \u2018The Feathered Serpent\u2019 and heading north towards Mexico.\u00a0 The raft capsized off Panama.<\/p>\n By now Savoy had an uneasy relationship with the academic archaeologist community<\/strong> who deplored his swashbuckling ways while building on his discoveries for their own research.<\/p>\n I once asked Savoy about the controversy some of his views had caused.\u00a0 \u2018I\u2019m not\u00a0 a maverick, not a rebel\u2019 he told me, a little unconvincingly.\u00a0 But his views on archaeologists were trenchant:\u00a0 \u2018You\u2019ve got to be a member of their club, like a golf-club or something\u2026What\u2019s an archaeologist?\u00a0 Someone who puts their head down a hole for forty years \u2013 but doesn\u2019t have much of an idea of what\u2019s outside the hole. They\u2019re so specialist they lose the plot.\u00a0 And they presume that anyone who doesn\u2019t have a bit of paper stuck on the wall as a diploma can\u2019t be intelligent.\u00a0\u00a0 Look what they\u2019ve said about us [ie explorers], about people like our wonderful Bingham, about Schliemann who\u2019s been criticised by pygmies who wouldn\u2019t even reach up to his boots.\u2019<\/p>\n But he emphasised that he continually returned to historical sources in order to find clues for his searches.\u00a0 \u2018No sensible man goes down into the jungle unless he\u2019s got something to follow.\u00a0 I see explorers as people with open minds who can scan many different sources for information, unconfined by an academic discipline, just like computers scan the internet.\u00a0 We\u2019ve all learnt that the great thing is to follow the roads.\u00a0 Roads lead to ruins.\u2019<\/p>\n As his close friend and associate Nicholas Asheshov has commented, \u2018Savoy always looked more like Buffalo Bill than Harrison Ford:\u00a0\u00a0 he didn\u2019t naturally inspire confidence in authority, let alone in the archaeologists.\u2019<\/p>\n Savoy died at his Reno, Nevada home on September 11, 2007 of natural causes.\u00a0 In his final years he founded a cult, the International Community of Christ, which taught its members that the secret to immortality lay in staring directly at the sun and thereby absorbing God as raw energy.\u00a0 He claimed that this secret had been revealed to him in the jungles of Peru.<\/p>\n Like his great hero Hemingway, Gene Savoy was a mythomane<\/em> determined to ignore the more banal details of his life story and instead create a heroic curve.\u00a0 In that, he was largely successful.<\/p>\n A shortened version of this obituary appeared in the Independent, along with an appreciation by Vince Lee<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Douglas Eugene “Gene” Savoy (May 11, 1927-September 11, 2007) Gene Savoy was perhaps the most successful South American explorer of his generation and certainly the most controversial. His discovery of \u2018Old Vilcabamba\u2019 at Esp\u00edritu Pampa in 1964 was the most important find of an Inca site since Hiram Bingham stumbled on Machu Picchu in 1911. 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<\/strong><\/p>\n