The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

From AD 400 to 800, during the rise of Copán, small settlements in Mosquitia sprang up and grew at a modest rate. But when Copán fell apart, the civilization in Mosquitia experienced the opposite: a tremendous flowering. By AD 1000, even as most of the Maya cities had been left to the monkeys and birds, the ancient inhabitants of Mosquitia were building their own cities, which were starting to look vaguely Maya in layout, with plazas, elevated platforms, earthworks, geometric mounds, and earthen pyramids. This is also when they seem to have adopted the Mesoamerican ball game. How were these ancient people of the Mosquitia rainforest able to settle and thrive in a snake- and disease-ridden jungle, an area far more challenging than most lands settled by the Maya? What was their relationship to their powerful neighbors, and what allowed them to flourish even as Copán was crumbling? In other words, how did they survive what the Maya couldn’t—and what eventually brought them down? 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. In this context, the discovery and continued exploration of T1 and T3 become enormously significant, bringing the region to the world’s attention and representing a turning point in our understanding of these vanished people. It was a formidable c...