"When I have a goal," says Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, her voice emphasizing the word, "everything else is secondary. And I don't let anything get in my way." At the moment, her goal is a site deep in Brazil's Amazon region, where no scientist has ever set foot. Four years ago, a gold prospector found a large, unusually shaped spear point and a well-preserved wooden harpoon on that spot. When Roosevelt first laid eyes on the miner's artifacts at a makeshift museum in a rural hotel in the Amazon two years ago, she knew she had to get to the spot and look for signs of an ancient settlement. It wouldn't be easy, but archaeology rarely is, particularly in the Amazon.
Archaeologists visiting remote sites in Brazil must rely on the skills of local pilots to locate—and land on—small airstrips in the rain forest. "The pilots here are very good," says Roosevelt, a veteran Amazon explorer, because the mining industry depends on them.
To reach the site, she and her crew will travel by single-engine plane to a small jungle airstrip. From there, we take open skiffs down a tributary of the Xingu River. The site happens to be underwater, so the boats will also have to carry a heavy load of scuba gear and a gasoline-powered air compressor to fill the tanks. This is what exploration looks like at the beginning of the 21st century.
At 55, Roosevelt, who is curator of archaeology at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History and professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is a veteran of more than 50 expeditions. She has spent her career taking risks, both by exploring remote sites and by challenging prevailing dogma. In doing so, she is helping to rewrite the history of humankind in this hemisphere.
