Gene Savoy, Flamboyant Explorer of Ruins, Dies at 80 (original) (raw)

Sept. 19, 2007

Gene Savoy, an amateur archaeologist whose success in finding some 40 Incan and pre-Incan ruins in Peru was matched by a flair for self-promotion that drew on his tales of peril in the jungle, his bandito mustache and Stetson hat, and a retinue of would-be explorers who paid to accompany him, died on Sept. 11 at his home in Reno, Nev. He was 80.

His son Sean said that he did not know the cause of death but that Mr. Savoy had suffered from vascular disease.

Mr. Savoy, who even founded his own religion, was a larger-than-life character and did not care who knew it. His quests were larger still: He sought the Fountain of Youth, the Treasure of El Dorado, proof that Solomon’s gold had come from South America and what his son called “the answers to life.”

His actual discoveries included Vilcabamba, the Incas’ last refuge from the Spanish, the place Hiram Bingham thought he had found with his discovery of Machu Picchu in 1911. He is also credited with finding Gran Pajatén, a pre-Incan stone city. And his discovery of Gran Vilaya, an intricate network of 24,000 stone structures covering 100 square miles of dense jungle, helped establish that a high civilization had existed in Peru apart from the coast and the Andes.

“He was a great adventurer and explorer,” Tom D. Dillehay, an anthropology professor at Vanderbilt University, said in an interview Monday.

Warren B. Church, an archaeologist at Columbus State University in Georgia, particularly applauded Mr. Savoy’s discovery of Vilcabamba. But as for Gran Pajatén, he said, Mr. Savoy’s claim of discovery in 1965 was not the first. He said a local mayor had reported that his townspeople had found the ruins a year earlier but that they had been ignored by the authorities in Lima.

That episode became further complicated when a University of Colorado team was given credit for the find in 1985 and Mr. Savoy objected that his own discovery had been widely reported 20 years earlier. (He neglected to mention the claim made by the local villagers still earlier, even though the mayor who had reported it was among those with him at Gran Pajatén.) When People magazine reported on the controversy between Mr. Savoy and the University of Colorado team, it likened Mr. Savoy to Indiana Jones, an image he assiduously polished in ensuing years.

Scientists have also questioned Mr. Savoy’s tendency to use his explorations to pursue unusual theories, his lack of scientific expertise and his ballyhooing of discoveries. Keith Muscutt, an archaeologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times in 2004 that finding ruins in the region where Mr. Savoy prowled “is about as hard as finding elephants in a zoo.”

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Gene Savoy on an expedition to Peruvian highlands in 1985.Credit...Associated Press

Others wondered if Mr. Savoy’s practice of allowing would-be explorers to pay to accompany him might have embellished his characterization of what they found. In 1967, the charge for a 21-day expedition for two was $10,160, The New York Times reported at the time.

Douglas Eugene Savoy was born in Bellingham, Wash., on May 11, 1927, and grew up fascinated with local Indians and archaeology. At 17, he joined the Navy and became an aircraft gunner. He attended the University of Portland, a Roman Catholic institution, but dropped out to pursue his broadening captivation with religion. For a decade, he studied subjects including philosophy and folklore, both on his own and with private tutors.

Then, in 1959, he founded the International Community of Christ, Church of the Second Advent, which claims thousands of followers around the world. Its theology, which is said to emerge from the teachings of the Essenes of Jesus’ time, includes elements of many world religions and holds that the Second Coming is already occurring.

Mr. Savoy went on his first archaeological mission in 1957, to Peru. It was canceled for lack of financing, but he stayed on.

In addition to pursuing terrestrial archaeology, he organized missions in an effort to prove that ancient civilizations had been connected by sea travel. The first such mission involved a voyage on a raft from northern Peru to Mexico. Another attempted a round-the-world trip intended to prove that the ancient Egyptians, Japanese, Incas and Jews could have been in touch.

Mr. Savoy married the former Sylvia Ontaneda in 1971; they divorced in 1992. His other marriages, to Carmel Cervetto and Elvira Clark, also ended in divorce. He is survived by the children of his first marriage, Gene Jr., Sean and Sylvia Jamila Savoy, all of Reno; three brothers, Bill Dailey of Reno, Jack Dailey of Medford, Ore., and Douglas Leon Dailey of Talent, Ore.; and three granddaughters.

Sean Savoy said that two additional sons had been born of his father’s marriage to Ms. Cervetto but that the family had lost touch with them.

Mr. Savoy wrote 60 books on religion and four on his explorations. His penchant for colorful recollections never abated in interviews, even as his health worsened. He spoke of friends’ being kidnapped by pirates, of a nearly fatal bite of a pit viper, of the utter loneliness of the sea.

But he could also be downright practical about the worth of his accomplishments: he said his discoveries, based on hunch and chutzpah, had paved the way for serious scientists.

Professor Dillehay agreed, and said the process was not over.

“Some of the sites that he discovered and examined have not been fully explored by others,” the professor said. “In some ways, his heyday has not yet come.”

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