The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

The lidar discoveries had confirmed that Mosquitia had indeed been the territory of a great and mysterious civilization that built many large settlements before it disappeared. It was exactly as Cortés had written five centuries ago: This land had been home to “very extensive and rich provinces.”

“There is no White City. The White City is a myth, a modern myth, largely created by adventurers. I’m quite biased against this group of people because they are adventurers and not archaeologists. They’re after spectacle. Culture is not something you can see from the lidar plane or from thousands of feet up. There’s this thing we call ‘ground truthing.’”

They needed someone who was not only a Mesoamerican specialist but also an expert in lidar interpretation. They found the right combination in the person of Chris Fisher, a professor of anthropology at Colorado State University. Fisher had worked with the Chases on the Caracol lidar project, had coauthored the scientific paper with them, and had been the first archaeologist to use lidar in Mexico.

He went on to get his PhD, with his dissertation focusing on a site in Michoacán, Mexico. While doing a survey in the area, he came across what looked like the remains of a small pre-Columbian village scattered about an ancient lava bed, called Angamuco, once a settlement of the fierce Purépecha (Tarascan) people, who rivaled the Aztecs in central Mexico from around AD 1000 until the arrival of the Spanish in the early 1500s.

In 2010, Fisher used lidar to map Angamuco. The results were perhaps even more astounding than those at Caracol. The images gathered after flying over Angamuco for just forty-five minutes revealed twenty thousand previously unknown archaeological features, including a bizarre pyramid that, seen from above, is shaped like a keyhole.

I asked Fisher whether the White City had finally been found. He laughed. “I don’t think there is a single Ciudad Blanca,” he said. “I think there are many.” The myth, he said, is real in the sense that it holds intense meaning for Hondurans, but for archaeologists it’s mostly a “distraction.”

Excited as he was to be fulfilling a lifelong dream, Steve had sacrificed his own early place in the helicopter for us, because he felt it was important to get the filmmakers, the writer, and the scientists into the valley first. He would fly in the following day.

a cut on the back of his hand.) He held up the headless snake by the tail, blood still dribbling from its neck. Nobody said a word. The snake’s muscles were still flexing slowly. Curious to touch it, I reached out and wrapped my hand around it, feeling the rhythmic writhing of muscles under its cool skin, a queer sensation indeed.

Special Forces soldiers, sent to guard the expedition team, had just arrived in good spirits after a hike upstream from the river junction. They had brought nothing but their weapons and the clothes on their backs; they intended to establish camp behind ours and live off the forest, building their shelters from poles and leaves, hunting their food and drinking from the river.

He believed it might have been a Mesoamerican ball court, having a similar geometry and size. This was especially interesting, as it indicated a possible link between this culture and its powerful Maya neighbors to the west and north. Far more than the casual recreation we think of when it comes to games of skill, in Mesoamerican cultures the ball game was a sacred ritual that reenacted the struggle between the forces of good and evil. It might also have been a way for groups to avoid warfare by solving conflicts through a match instead, one that occasionally ended with human sacrifice, including the decapitation of the losing team or its captain.

The cache was vast, containing over five hundred pieces, but more intriguing even than its size was its existence at all. This particular type of ritual collection of artifacts seems to be a special feature of these lost cities of ancient Mosquitia—they have not been seen in Maya culture or elsewhere—meaning that they could hold a key to what distinguishes the people of Mosquitia from their neighbors and defines their place in history. What was the purpose of these caches? Why were they left here? While similar caches had been reported in Mosquitia before, none had been found so fully intact, offering a rare opportunity for the spot to be systematically studied and excavated. The significance of this offering would prove to be the expedition’s greatest discovery so far, one that had important implications far beyond Mosquitia.

When we returned to camp, more visitors had arrived. Tom Lutz, a writer, literary critic, and founder of the Los Angeles Review of Books, was covering the expedition as a freelancer for the New York Times.

It’s much bigger than T1. It was huge. There were a lot of people living there.” The valley of T3, like T1, gave every indication of being another untouched wilderness with no evidence of recent human entry or indigenous use. As of this writing, beyond these two reconnaissance missions T3 remains unexplored.

“What’s driving the deforestation near here,” he said, confirming what others had told me, “isn’t mahogany but clearing the land for cattle.”

Plotkin was profoundly impressed by the valley. He said that, in all his years wandering the jungle, he had never seen a place like it. “This is clearly one of the most undisturbed rainforests in Central America,” he said. “The importance of this place cannot be overestimated. Spectacular ruins, pristine wilderness—this place has it all. I’ve been walking tropical American rainforests for thirty years and I’ve never walked up to a collection of artifacts like that. And I probably won’t ever again.”

He was going to hike up there in the dark with Sully so that he could “light-paint” the artifacts. This is a difficult photographic technique in which the camera, on a tripod, is left with the shutter open while the photographer sweeps light beams over the objects from different angles, to highlight particular details and add a sense of drama and mystery.

As we reached the gap, we saw the first evidence of historic human occupation in the valley—a tattered cluster of wild banana trees. Banana trees were not native; originally from Asia, they had been brought to Central America by the Spanish. This was the only sign we ever saw of post-Conquest habitation in the valley.

T1 had finally joined the rest of the world in having been discovered, explored, mapped, measured, trod upon, and photographed—a forgotten place no more. Thrilled as I was to have been a member of this first lucky few, I had the sense that our exploration had diminished it, stripping it of its secrets.

While this was going on, controversy erupted. Christopher Begley of Transylvania University (the archaeologist in Jungleland) and Rosemary Joyce of Berkeley began circulating a letter criticizing the expedition

They were concerned about language that felt like a throwback to the bad old colonialist, Indiana Jones days of archaeology. The letter made some valid points.

They lectured native people on what their past was and where they came from, dismissing as myths their own origin beliefs. They claimed to have “discovered” sites that were already well known to native people.

All this made it clear that the protest letter was, in part, a proxy attack on the present Honduran government, an example of how the coup and its aftermath left the Honduran archaeological community angry and divided. We would see more evidence of this when excavations began the following year, reigniting the controversy. Many of the letter signers have found it difficult to let go of the dispute and continue to disparage the project.

Bones rarely survive long in the tropics, but in this case the coating of calcite had preserved them.

Some pottery bowls had holes punched in the bottom, which was a curious but widespread practice in pre-Columbian America, the ritual “killing” of an object placed in a grave to release its spirit so that it could follow its owner to the underworld.

As spectacular as this find was, the real shock came when the bones were carbon-dated. The oldest ones were three thousand years old, far older than anyone had assumed, and the burials had taken place over a period of a thousand years.

Although the cave was situated on the Maya frontier, it appeared to belong to an entirely different and virtually unknown culture. While the Maya also buried their dead in caves, the way in which these bones were arranged and the kinds of artifacts that had been left with them were different from what one would expect from Maya cave burials. The ossuary was the work of a sophisticated, socially stratified, and artistically advanced culture, one that developed astonishingly early, even before the Maya.

In contrast to the Old World idea that the dead live on in the heavens, in Mesoamerican belief the dead live within the earth and mountains. Caves are sacred, as they are a direct connection to that underground spiritual world. The ancestors living underground continue to take care of the living, watching over them. The living can contact the dead by going deep into the caves, leaving offerings, conducting rituals, and praying. The cave is a church, in essence,

Three to two thousand years ago, he said, we have the burials but not the settlements; and then a thousand years later we have the settlements but not the burials.

The major Chibchan-speaking civilization, the Muisca, lived in Colombia. It was a powerful chiefdom known for intricate goldwork. The Muisca confederation was the source of the El Dorado legends, based on a real tradition in which a new king, smeared in sticky mud and then covered with gold dust, would dive into Lake Guatavita in Colombia, washing off the gold in the lake as an offering to the gods.

In AD 426, a ruler named K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ (Sun-Eyed Resplendent Quetzal Macaw) came down from the Maya city of Tikal, in Guatemala, and seized control of the settlement of Copán in a coup or invasion. He became Copán’s first “Holy Lord” and launched a dynasty of sixteen lords that would elevate Copán into a glorious city dominating the area for centuries.

Copán is as far south as the Maya appear to have reached. Perhaps they were stymied by forbidding mountains and jungle. Perhaps they met resistance. As a result, even after the Maya invasion of Copán in the fifth century, Mosquitia was left to develop on its own.

The physical anthropologist who analyzed his remains wrote that, “In today’s world, it would appear that the deceased had survived an auto accident in which he had been thrown from the vehicle.” But in the ancient world, the injuries were probably caused by playing the famed Mesoamerican ball game called pitz in classical Mayan.

We know from early accounts and pre-Columbian illustrations that the game was extremely fierce. One sixteenth-century friar, a rare eyewitness, spoke of players being killed instantly when the five-pound ball, made of solid latex sap, hit them on a hard rebound; he also described many others who “suffered terrible injuries” and were carried from the field to die later.

the burial confirmed he had not ascended dynastically to the throne from a local elite; he was definitely a foreigner to Copán. Symbols on his shield and the Groucho Marx–style goggle-eyed headdress connected him to the ancient city of Teotihuacan, located north of Mexico City, which in his day was the largest city in the New World. (Today it is a magnificent ruin containing some of the greatest pyramids in the Americas.)

An analysis of isotopes in his bones, however, showed he had grown up not in Teotihuacan, but probably in the Maya city of Tikal, in northern Guatemala, two hundred miles north of Copán. (Drinking water, which varies from place to place, leaves a unique chemical signature in the bones.)

the many graves unearthed at Copán show that after AD 650, the health and nutrition of the common people appeared to decline. This happened even as the ruling classes apparently swelled in size over succeeding generations, with each generation larger than the last—in what archaeologists call the “increasingly parasitic role of the elite.” (We see the same process today in the gross expansion of the Saudi royal family into no fewer than fifteen thousand princes and princesses.) This proliferation of noble lineages may have triggered vicious internecine warfare and killing among the elite.

“We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.”

While the Maya are the most studied of ancient cultures in the Americas, the people of Mosquitia have been among the least—a question mark embodied by the legend of the White City. This culture is so little known that it hasn’t even been given a formal name.

Another reason for this neglect is that the jungle-choked mounds in Mosquitia are, at first glance, not nearly as sexy as the cut-stone temples of the Maya or the intricate gold artwork of the Muisca.

He pointed out that in the Maya realm, when a king was defeated, before being executed he was sometimes forced to witness the killing of his entire family and the desecration of his family’s tombs, in which the corpses were removed and ritually destroyed in a public place. “He sees not only his family being destroyed,” Hoopes said, “but his entire dynasty being erased.”

it would appear that the focus of the cache was on birth, death, and transition to the spirit world.

ancient people engaged in this ceremonial destruction at gravesites so that objects could journey with the deceased to the afterworld.

Taken together, these clues imply the cache was assembled during a ritual closing of the city at the time of its final abandonment. In this scenario, the last remaining inhabitants of the city gathered up all their sacred objects and left them as a final offering to the gods as they departed, breaking them to release their spirits.

It seems that a civilization-wide catastrophe involving the “death” of all these cities occurred at approximately the same time, around 1500—the time of the Spanish conquest. Yet the Spanish never conquered the region;

In October of 1493, Columbus set sail on his second voyage to the New World. This expedition was very different from the first. That one, with three ships, had been a voyage of exploration: This one was primarily aimed at subjugation, colonization, and conversion.

It was disease, more than anything else, that allowed the Spanish to establish the world’s first imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol, the “empire on which the sun never sets,” so called because it occupied a swath of territory so extensive that some of it was always in daylight.

In their wandering passage through the Caribbean, the ships with their sick crews unknowingly spread epidemics of illness at many of the ports they visited. By 1494, these epidemics merged into a plague raging across Hispaniola and the rest of the Caribbean. “There came among [the Indians] such illness, death and misery,” Bartolomé de las Casas wrote, “that of fathers, mothers and children, an infinite number sadly died.” He estimated that a third of the population died in the two years from 1494 to 1496.

Modern epidemiologists have studied the old accounts to figure out what diseases struck down the Indians during these first epidemics. Their best guesses are influenza, typhus, and dysentery.

But we know for certain that Columbus, on his fourth voyage in 1502, inadvertently unleashed disease on mainland America.

But the real apocalypse was yet to come. That arrived in the form of smallpox. Las Casas wrote that “it was carried by someone from Castile,” and it arrived in Hispaniola in December of 1518.