An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with dramatic news of the discovery of a mysterious culture\u2019s lost city, never before explored. The team was led to the remote, uninhabited region by long-standing rumors that it was the site of a storied \u201cWhite City,\u201d also referred to in legend as the \u201cCity of the Monkey God.\u201d
Archaeologists surveyed and mapped extensive plazas, earthworks, mounds, and an earthen pyramid belonging to a culture that thrived a thousand years ago, and then vanished. The team, which returned from the site last Wednesday, also discovered a remarkable cache of stone sculptures that had lain untouched since the city was abandoned.
In contrast to the nearby Maya, this vanished culture has been scarcely studied and it remains virtually unknown. Archaeologists don\u2019t even have a name for it.
Christopher Fisher, a Mesoamerican archaeologist on the team from Colorado State University, said the pristine, unlooted condition of the site was \u201cincredibly rare.\u201d He speculated that the cache, found at the base of the pyramid, may have been an offering.
\u201cThe undisturbed context is unique,\u201d Fisher said. \u201cThis is a powerful ritual display, to take wealth objects like this out of circulation.\u201d
The tops of 52 artifacts were peeking from the earth. Many more evidently lie below ground, with possible burials. They include stone ceremonial seats (called metates) and finely carved vessels decorated with snakes, zoomorphic figures, and vultures.
The most striking object emerging from the ground is the head of what Fisher speculated might be \u201ca were-jaguar,\u201d possibly depicting a shaman in a transformed, spirit state. Alternatively, the artifact might be related to ritualized ball games that were a feature of pre-Columbian life in Mesoamerica.
\u201cThe figure seems to be wearing a helmet,\u201d said Fisher. Team member Oscar Neil Cruz, head archaeologist at the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH), believes the artifacts date to A.D. 1000 to 1400.
The objects were documented but left unexcavated. To protect the site from looters, its location is not being revealed.
The ruins were first identified in May 2012, during an aerial survey of a remote valley in La Mosquitia, a vast region of swamps, rivers, and mountains containing some of the last scientifically unexplored places on earth.
For a hundred years, explorers and prospectors told tales of the white ramparts of a lost city glimpsed above the jungle foliage. Indigenous stories speak of a \u201cwhite house\u201d or a \u201cplace of cacao\u201d where Indians took refuge from Spanish conquistadores\u2014a mystical, Eden-like paradise from which no one ever returned.
Since the 1920s, several expeditions had searched for the White City, or Ciudad Blanca. The eccentric explorer Theodore Morde mounted the most famous of these in 1940, under the aegis of the Museum of the American Indian (now part of the Smithsonian Institution).
Morde returned from Mosquitia with thousands of artifacts, claiming to have entered the City. According to Morde, the indigenous people there said it contained a giant, buried statue of a monkey god. He refused to divulge the location out of fear, he said, that the site would be looted. He later committed suicide and his site\u2014if it existed at all\u2014was never identified.
More recently, documentary filmmakers Steve Elkins and Bill Benenson launched a search for the lost city.
They identified a crater-shaped valley, encircled by steep mountains, as a possible location.
To survey it, in 2012 they enlisted the help of the Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston. A Cessna Skymaster, carrying a million-dollar lidar scanner, flew over the valley, probing the jungle canopy with laser light. lidar\u2014\u201cLight Detection and Ranging\u201d\u2014is able to map the ground even through dense rain forest, delineating any archaeological features that might be present.
When the images were processed, they revealed unnatural features stretching for more than a mile through the valley. When Fisher analyzed the images, he found that the terrain along the river had been almost entirely reshaped by human hands.
The evidence of public and ceremonial architecture, giant earthworks and house mounds, possible irrigation canals and reservoirs, all led Fisher to conclude that the settlement was, indeed, a pre-Columbian city.
An archaeological discovery isn\u2019t confirmed until it has been \u201cground-truthed.\u201d The ground exploration team consisted of American and Honduran archaeologists, a lidar engineer, an anthropologist, an ethnobotanist, documentary filmmakers, and support personnel. Sixteen Honduran Special Forces soldiers provided security. The National Geographic Society sent a photographer and a writer.
The expedition confirmed on the ground all the features seen in the lidar images, along with much more. It was indeed an ancient city. Archaeologists, however, no longer believe in the existence of a single \u201clost city,\u201d or Ciudad Blanca, as described in the legends. They believe Mosquitia harbors many such \u201clost cities,\u201d which taken together represent something far more important\u2014a lost civilization.
The valley is densely carpeted in a rain forest so primeval that the animals appear never to have seen humans before. An advance team clearing a landing zone for helicopters supplying the expedition noted spider monkeys peering down curiously from the trees above, and guinea hen and a tapir wandering into camp, unafraid of the human visitors.
\u201cThis is clearly the most undisturbed rain forest in Central America,\u201d said the expedition\u2019s ethnobotanist, Mark Plotkin, who spent 30 years in Amazonia. \u201cThe importance of this place can\u2019t be overestimated.\u201d
The region also is gravely threatened. Deforestation for ranching has checkerboarded the jungle to within a dozen miles of the valley. Huge swaths of virgin rain forest are being cut illegally and burned to make way for cattle. The region has become one of the biggest beef-producing areas in Central America, supplying meat to fast-food franchises in the United States.
Virgilio Paredes Trapero, the director of the IHAH, under whose auspices the expedition operated, spent several days at the site. He concluded: \u201cIf we don\u2019t do something right away, most of this forest and valley will be gone in eight years.\u201d He spread his hands. \u201cThe Honduran government is committed to protecting this area, but doesn\u2019t have the money. We urgently need international support.\u201d
The expedition was made possible with the permission, partnership, and support of the government of Honduras; Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández Avarado; Virgilio Paredes Trapero, director of the Honduran Institute for Anthropology and History (IHAH); Oscar Neil Cruz, Chief of the Archaeology Division of IHAH, as well as Minister of Defense Samuel Reyes and the Armed Forces of Honduras under the command of Gen. Fredy Santiago Díaz Zelaya, with Gen. Carlos Roberto Puerto and Lt. Col. Willy Joel Oseguera, and the soldiers of TESON, Honduran Special Forces.
Douglas Preston writes about archaeology for the New Yorker and other publications. His account of Coronado\u2019s search for the Seven Cities of Gold was recently issued as an e-book.
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