The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

Up to this moment of discovery, the image most North Americans carried of Indians came from the hunter-gatherer tribes they had read about or encountered along the frontier. Most viewed the aboriginal inhabitants of the New World as half-naked, savage Indians who had never achieved anything approaching what was termed “civilization.” Stephens’s explorations changed all that. It was an important moment in history, when the world realized that stupendous civilizations had arisen independently in the Americas.

Before long, the Maya became one of the most intensively studied ancient cultures in the New World, and not just by secular scientists. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints identified the Maya as one of the lost tribes of Israel, the Lamanites, as chronicled in The Book of Mormon, published in 1830.

In the twentieth century the Mormon Church sent a number of well-funded archaeologists to Mexico and Central America to try to confirm the stories through site excavations. Although this resulted in valuable, high-quality research, it also proved difficult for the scientists themselves; facing clear evidence that disproved the Mormon view of history, some of the archaeologists ended up losing their faith, and a few of those who voiced their doubts were excommunicated.

were not Maya cities: The Maya built with stone, while this region had been extensively settled by a separate, sophisticated culture that built great earthen mounds.

He hired an explorer named Frederick Mitchell-Hedges, a British adventurer who claimed to have found the Maya city of Lubaantun in Belize, where his daughter allegedly discovered the famous crystal “Skull of Doom.”

In hundreds of pages of entries, this is the entire sum of information touching on the lost city they were supposedly trying to find, the city they had described so vividly to the American media.

The journals reveal they found in Mosquitia no ruins, no artifacts, no sites, no “Lost City of the Monkey God.” So what were Morde and Brown doing in Mosquitia, during those four months of silence, while Heye and the world held their breath? What were they after? Gold.

We now know, however, that it does not contain coded directions to the lost city. In a journal entry on June 17, 1940, on the very last day of the expedition before his reemergence from the wilderness and arrival in a civilized town, Morde wrote: “We are convinced no great civilization ever existed up there. And there are no archaeological discoveries of importance to be made.”

Loot of Lima, also known as the Cocos Island treasure.

There was no sign of any lost cities, but they did make a discovery. “All of a sudden there was this big boulder in a stream,” Elkins said, “with a carving on it showing a guy with a fancy headdress planting seeds.” He had what he called an “epiphany”—here was proof, if more were needed, that a sophisticated and mysterious people had once lived and farmed in a land that today was deep, uninhabited jungle.

From the time of its independence in 1821 to the present, Honduras has suffered through a tumultuous history that includes close to 300 civil wars, rebellions, coups, and unplanned changes in government.

The American appetite for bananas was insatiable. (And it still is; the banana is consistently the number one–selling item in Walmart superstores.)

Zemurray was a remarkably brilliant, complex, and contradictory man.

Preston, Zemurray, and the fruit companies left a dark colonialist legacy that has hung like a miasma over Honduras ever since.

Also known as the Cocos Island treasure, the Loot of Lima was an alleged fortune in gold and gems—estimated to be worth around a billion dollars—that is believed to have been spirited out of Lima, Peru, in 1821, during the Peruvian War of Independence. The city of Lima was under siege, and the Spanish viceroy reportedly wanted to keep the city’s vast treasure out of the hands of the revolutionaries, should the city fall to the rebels.

“LiDAR can produce images of landscapes faster than people walking the same area, and with more detail. But that is not good archaeology, because all it produces is a discovery—not knowledge. If it’s a competition, then I will bet my money on people doing ground survey… LiDAR is expensive. And I question the value you get for the money it costs… [Lidar] may be good science—but it is bad archaeology.”

He concluded that the ceremonial architecture, the giant earthworks, and the multiple plazas revealed in the images suggested that both T1 and T3 were ancient “cities,” as defined archaeologically. He cautioned that this was not necessarily how the average person might define a city. “A city,” he explained, “is a complex social organization, multifunctional; it has a socially stratified population with clear divisions of space, intimately connected to the hinterlands. Cities have special functions, including ceremonial, and are associated with intensive agriculture. And they usually involve major, monumental reconstruction of the environment.”

These were Special Forces TESON soldiers, many of whom were indigenous Pech, Tawahka, Garifuna, and Miskito people from eastern Honduras. “The soldiers are self-sufficient,” Oseguera said. “They camp on their own. They are very old-school and live like Indians.”

“I’ve had dengue fever twice,” Woody said, and launched into a shockingly graphic description of the disease, which had almost killed him the second time. It is called “breakbone fever,” he said, because it is so painful you feel like your bones are breaking.

When we reached the second mudhole, Alicia struggled to walk through the muck, got stuck, and—as we watched, aghast—began to sink. “I can’t move,” she said with remarkable calmness, even as she was sinking. “I can’t move my legs at all. I’m going down. Really, folks, I’m going down.” The mud was already at her waist, and the more she struggled, the more it gurgled up around her. It was like something straight out of a B horror film.

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.

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, a place where the living come to petition their ancestors for favor and protection.

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.)

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.)

Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, argues that the destruction of Copán was caused by environmental degradation combined with royal neglect and incompetence. Beginning around AD 650, the rulers of Copán engaged in a building spree, erecting gorgeous temples and monuments that glorified themselves and their deeds. As is typical of Maya inscriptions, not a single one at Copán mentions a commoner.

This type of class division usually works when everyone believes they are part of a system, with each person occupying a valued place in society and contributing to the vital ceremonies that maintain the cosmic order.

Diamond writes: “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.” (If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.)

One of the most intriguing theories about why Mosquitia began to look Maya involves what archaeologists call the “esoteric knowledge” model. In many societies, the elites rule over the common people and get them to do what they want by displaying their sanctity and holiness. This ruling class of priests and lords awe the populace with arcane rituals and ceremonies using secret knowledge. The priests claim, and of course themselves believe, that they are performing rites that are essential to appease the gods and gain divine favor for everyone’s benefit—to

Epidemiologists generally agree that smallpox is the cruelest disease ever to afflict the human race. In the century before it was eradicated in the 1970s, it killed more than half a billion people and left millions of others horribly scarred and blind.

Unlike most other viruses, smallpox can survive and remain virulent for months or years outside the body in clothing, blankets, and sickrooms.

“When the Christians were exhausted from war,” one friar wrote, “God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox.” In sixty days, smallpox carried off at least half of the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan, which had a precontact population of 300,000 or more.

While the Maya cities were no longer inhabited, the Maya people were spread out over the region and were still known for their fierceness and military prowess.

When the city at T1 was swept by epidemics, and the people felt they had been abandoned by their gods, I wondered what ceremonies they might have performed in a desperate effort to restore the cosmic order. Whatever they did, it failed; feeling cursed and rejected by the gods, they left the city, never to return.

Hernández closed out his speech with one final, dramatic proclamation. The city in T1 would henceforth be given a real name: La Ciudad del Jaguar, the City of the Jaguar.

When people in the Near East first domesticated cattle from a type of wild ox called an aurochs, a mutation in the cowpox virus allowed it to jump into humans—and smallpox was born. Rinderpest in cattle migrated to people and became measles. Tuberculosis probably originated in cattle, influenza in birds and pigs, whooping cough in pigs or dogs, and malaria in chickens and ducks. The same process goes on today: Ebola probably jumped to humans from bats, while HIV crashed into our species from monkeys and chimpanzees.

Global warming has opened the southern door of the United States not just to leish but to many other diseases. The big ones now entering our country include Zika, West Nile virus, chikungunya, and dengue fever. Even diseases like cholera, Ebola, Lyme, babesiosis, and bubonic plague will potentially infect more people as global warming accelerates.

The world’s last great pandemic was the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918 that killed a hundred million people—about 5 percent of the world’s population. If a pandemic like that were to happen again, it would spread faster and might be impossible to contain.

Pre.covid comment

No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.