Gene Savoy, who died September 12 at 80, spent decades hacking through South American jungles searching for El Dorado and, perhaps, eternal life.

What he manage to discover were dozens of new archaeological sites — “lost cities,” he called them — including a few spectacular ones, such as Vilcabamba, among the last refuges of Peru’s Inca population from the Spanish Conquistadors.

Distrusted by academic archaeologists but not always dismissed — his maps and intuitions were often useful — Savoy harked back to an age of amateur explorers with amateur theories, and his theories matched his forebears’ in their scope. He sought to demonstrate connections between Peruvian civilizations and those of Phoenicia and Egypt as evidenced by “early Egypto-Arabic, pre-Hebrew glyphs” he claimed to have found on tablets in a burial cave. He suspected, he said, that Peru was the mysterious land of Ophir, where King Solomon sent his ships for gold.

In tradition of Thor Heyerdahl, Savoy constructed boats allegedly based on local designs he found on pots. In 1969, he embarked in a reed raft from Peru to demonstrate that part of the Aztec pantheon had been imported from the south. After being borne 2,000 miles north by the Humboldt Current, he was becalmed in the Bay of Panama; he determined that the original deity must have switched to canoe.

Another maritime voyage, in 1999, took him to Hawaii, from Peru via mahogany catamaran to prove, apparently, that somebody ancient might have done the same thing. The expedition, which planned global circumnavigation in seven years, ended just days out of Hilo when a big wave buckled a crossbeam en route to Australia.

A bigger impediment to Savoy was that his theories of immortality turned out not to be true, or at least they were incomplete. (He wrote about them in a 1977 book, “Project X.”) Only initiates of his International Community of Christ, Church of the Second Advent, founded in 1971, were privy to the mysteries of what he called “Cosolargy.” But most people who talked to him came away convinced it had something to do with solar worship and Essene scriptures. Savoy liked to boast that, as early as 1945, he had taught himself to stare directly at the sun.

Born May 11, 1927, in Bellingham, Wash., Douglas Eugene Savoy grew up exploring local caves and fossil hunting. After serving in the Navy in World War II, he gave up dreams of studying for the Catholic priesthood and became a reporter for an Oregon lumber-trade paper.

Savoy was inspired when news emerged in the late 1940s of the mystical Dead Sea Scrolls. After his marriage and business petered out in the mid-1950s, he flew to Peru, having decided to investigate a mysterious pre-Inca civilization called the Chachapoyas, or “cloud people.” Within a few years, Savoy began working with Peruvian archaeologists, and news of his first “trove” was reported in North American papers in 1958. It was an 11-square-mile city of adobe buildings, some of them monumental, near Trujillo, Peru.

Every few years from then on, Savoy would make ethnohistorical news, including at places with names like Gran Pajaten and Gran Vilaya. Meanwhile, he was building up an impressive array of theories, including the idea that the highland Chachapoyas had originated in lowland Amazonian jungles. His spiritual and religious ideas developed, as well. He was first ordained, his religion’s Web site claims, in 1962 and founded his Church of the Second Advent in 1971. Later, he opened Jamilian University in Reno, Nev., and welcomed seminarians.

He slowed down in recent years. Savoy’s last expedition to South America culminated in the announcement of the discovery of Gran Saposoa, another Chachapoya city, this one about 300 miles north of Lima. But in recent years, Gran Saposoa has been looted, much to the consternation of Savoy and his son, Sean, who has followed in his father’s footsteps as an explorer of worlds sacred and profane. The looting raised a fundamental issue between Savoy and those he often derided as “fuddy duddy” (i.e. credentialed) archaeologists: whether announcing such sites before they were studied and protected was wise.

Shortly after Savoy died last week, the government of Peru and Yale University reached a preliminary agreement to build a new museum at Machu Picchu, another spectacular Peruvian citadel, and return to Peru thousands of artifacts brought to New Haven by Savoy’s most famous predecessor in Peru, Hiram Bingham III.

Like the ancient civilizations they rediscover, the reputations and deeds of explorers are liable to radical revision by later generations.