Reply #11: This article would make it seem he was a key character in this research

[Judi Lynn]

Pay Dirt
Thriving civilization or ‘counterfeit paradise’?
The clues are underfoot as a UVM professor and an alumnus join forces to rethink the Amazon’s past
Story by Lee Ann Cox

.....In this part of Brazil, near the spot where the Rio Negro meets the Amazon, a good day means mind-bending heat, humidity that will cover a book in mold within a week, a nighttime torrent of mosquitoes, not to mention the menacing tarantulas, anacondas, and jaguars.

James Petersen usually bears the harshness of life here with equanimity, but today the rains are heavy. It’s too wet to dig, and with clothes soaked, Petersen and his fellow archeologists are chilled despite the steamy heat. They are scanning the ground for artifacts when Petersen has what he calls an “epiphany moment.”

“I look down and I see a face smiling up at me,” he recalls. It’s a piece of pottery broken off a jar, a human face, almost life size. “I had been cold and distracted and uncomfortable, and then the humanity of the Indians came to me like a shot. I had a communication, in a way, with the people of the Açutuba site. It was really dramatic.”

The year is 1985. Petersen, an ecological anthropologist and ceramics expert, has until then taken a pragmatic approach to his career. At the time, he is founder and director of a busy consulting archeology program at the University of Maine at Farmington; joining the UVM faculty is twelve years in his future and his work in the Amazon is just a summer vacation. But when he’s there he feels the ghosts of Pre-Columbian Indians and they seem to be telling him — along with others who are increasingly called to listen — that their story is vastly different from the one we’ve been told. Now Petersen is dedicated to setting the record straight — and rewriting the history of the Amazon in the process.
(snip/...)

http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/vq/vqspring05/amazon.html

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It also sounds as if there is a determined counter movement which denies their findings. Is it possible that for whatever reasons they could hire a staged robbery which gave a misleading appearance to his killing?