The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

While the valley is spectacularly isolated now, in its heyday it was a center of trade and commerce. “When you’re here today,” Chris said, “you feel so disconnected. It’s a wilderness, and it’s hard to imagine you’re even in the twenty-first century. But in the past, it wasn’t isolated at all. It was in the midst of an intense network of human interaction.” Situated in a fortress-like valley, the city of T1 would have been a highly defensible place of retreat, something akin to a medieval castle that was normally a bustling center of trade but, if threatened, could raise its drawbridge, arm the battlements, and defend itself from attack. Because of this, T1 might have been part of a strategic zone of control in pre-Columbian times, possibly an anchor that defended the interior from invaders coming inland from the coast. It may also have been a bulwark against attacks from the Maya realm. And then, around 1500, this culture collapsed. But unlike the Maya, who experienced a multitiered collapse, with various city-states declining at different times, the Mosquitia civilization vanished everywhere all at once—in a sudden, civilization-wide catastrophe. “We have only a glimpse of this great culture,” said Oscar Neil, “before it vanished in the forest.”