For many the phrase "gold rush" conjures up images of the 1849ers panning for gold in the western United States. But in 1979, the biggest gold rush of this century began in the Brazilian Amazon and has continued unabated ever since. Despite attempts by governments and mining companies to control it, the Amazon gold rush has flourished, involving hundreds of thousands of miners in an informal-sector industry which produces over a billion dollars' worth of gold annually. Moreover, the mining activity has become famous--or infamous--well beyond Brazil, thanks to the furor it has raised in the environmental community. This important anthropological study takes the first broad and balanced look at the gold rush to explain its history, the social organization of the gold camps, the politics and the economics of gold in Brazil, and the implications of the gold rush for Amazonia and its people.