What Strong realized right away was that these 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. This was an entirely new culture. Even as Strong’s work showed definitively that Mosquitia was not part of the Maya realm, however, his discoveries raised more questions than they answered. Who were these people, where had they come from, and why had all record of them vanished until now? How in the world did they manage to live and farm in such a hostile jungle environment? What was
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