LIMA, Peru (AP) -- An American explorer credited with discovering several major Indian ruins in Peru's rain forests believes he has located another jewel in the jungle.
"I believe we have found the environs of the lost city of Conturmarca," Gene Savoy said returning from a month-long expedition in Peru's high cloud forest. "It's a lost world with the remains of the Chachapoyas people."Savoy described the Chachapoyas as tall and fierce warriors who were defeated by the Incas about 500 years ago, shortly before the Spanish conquest of Peru. He said the Incas so respected their fighting prowess that they made the Chachapoyas their bodyguards.
The 72-year-old adventurer's latest find comes a year after his catamaran, a 73-foot boat designed along the lines of a pre-Inca sailing vessel, sank in the South Pacific. The disaster cut short a voyage aimed at showing that Peru's advanced Indian civilizations could have had contact with cultures in other parts of the world.
The robust explorer, who lives most of the year in Reno, Nev., where he directs the Andean Explorers Foundation, has irked many academics with his theories. He has written three books about his expeditions.
Among his many discoveries are three major ruins -- Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Incas; Gran Pajaten, a citadel city atop a jungle-shrouded peak; and Gran Vilaya, a complex of more than 20,000 stone buildings in a damp, fog-bound region of the Andes that Peruvians call the "jungle's eyebrow."
He says Gran Vilaya, situated on a ridge 6,000 feet above the Maranon River, was the capital of the Chachapoyas empire. The Incas conquered it in the late 15th century.
But legend tells of a network of seven Chachapoyas cities strung like a necklace along the heights of the high jungle of northern Peru. Conturmarca, his latest find, was the centerpiece, Savoy said.
With a team of six Americans, 40 porters and 50 horses and pack animals, Savoy set out on Aug. 20 toward a valley along the Tepna River, 320 miles north of Lima.
He said the expedition discovered dozens of circular stone burial towers holding the centuries-old skeletal remains of Chachapoyas warriors.
The area was crisscrossed with stone roads and was littered with Chachapoyas maces and Incan battle axes, he said.
"There must have been battles involved because we saw their heads had been opened; their skulls had been cracked," Savoy said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It's a magic land. I have never seen an area so pristine and virgin and beautiful. There are ruins dotting the whole area."