The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  When we asked what it was, he said, “I can’t describe it. I won’t describe it. You just have to see it yourself.”

  There was pandemonium. Steve started to run, and then remembered he was a filmmaker, so he began shouting for his film crew to get their gear together and record the moment—cinema verité. With the cameras rolling, everyone crowded into Sartori’s room to look at the images on his laptop. The maps were in gray scale and a first iteration, but they were clear enough. In the valley of T1, above the confluence of the two streams, we could see rectangular features and long, pyramid-like mounds arranged in squares, which covered an area of hundreds of acres. Also visible, but impossible to interpret, were the two objects that looked like square pillars we had seen from the plane. As we examined the images, Sartori’s in-box was pinging continuously with e-mails from Carter and Shrestha, who were poring over the same maps, shooting off an e-mail with coordinates every time they found another feature.

  I was stunned. It sure as hell looked like a very large set of ruins, perhaps even a city. I had thought we would be fortunate to find any kind of site at all; I had not expected this. Was it possible that an entire lost city could still be found in the twenty-first century?

  I could see Sartori’s spiral-bound notebook lying open next to the laptop. In keeping with the methodical scientist he was, he had been jotting daily notes on his work. But underneath the entry for May 5, he had written two words only:

  HOLY SHIT!

  “When I saw those rectangles and squares,” Steve told me later, “my first feeling was one of vindication.” Benenson, who had been feverishly capturing the unfolding discovery on video, was happily stunned that the million-dollar spin of the roulette wheel had landed on his number. “I’m witnessing this,” he said, “but I’m not processing this very well. I have chills.”

  Nobody dared wake up Bruce Heinicke to tell him the news. He finally emerged from his bungalow at 1:00 p.m. and listened with a frown on his face. He wondered why we were all so worked up—of course the White City was there. Who the fuck thought otherwise? He got on the phone to Áfrico Madrid, the minister of the interior. Áfrico said he would fly out to Roatán as soon as possible to review what we found and, if he was convinced it was real—and he had no reason to doubt it—he would convey the news to President Lobo, as well as to the president of the Honduran Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández. Meanwhile, the director of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia, Virgilio Paredes, flew to Roatán to take a first look at our findings. Later, he recalled that moment: “I saw that and I said ‘Wow!’ We know Mosquitia is full of archaeological sites, but to see real cities, a big population of people living there—that is amazing!”

  The valley of T1 had been mapped, but the project was only 40 percent complete: T2 and T3 remained to be explored. Chuck and Juan Carlos had headed off early that Saturday morning to continue mapping T2, unaware of the uproar of discovery occurring back at the Parrot Tree. Once in the air, however, Juan Carlos discovered the lidar machine was dead. They returned to Roatán and tried to get the machine working while the plane was on the ground, with no success. At around nine that morning all three lidar engineers examined it and confirmed the machine was kaput.

  NCALM in Houston had a technical maintenance contract with a team in Toronto, Canada, where this lidar box had been designed and built. As it was a weekend, there was only a single tech-support person in Canada manning the phone. After he walked the lidar engineers through a plug-unplug sequence, trying to wake up the machine, they determined that a crucial part had failed. It was called a Position and Orientation System (POS) board, and it contained a GPS receiver and other components that “talked” to the IMU, exchanging data. There were only two POS boards in the world, both in Canada. The company would put a technician on a flight from Toronto to Roatán early Monday morning, transporting the $100,000 board in person in his carry-on bag. The part would have to clear customs twice, once in the United States and a second time in Honduras.

  The engineer flying the part was Pakistani and, not having a US State Department export clearance for the POS board, he was worried about being stopped with it at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC, where he had an overnight connection. Before boarding the plane in Toronto, he panicked and stuck the part in his checked luggage, thinking that it would be less likely to prompt a security challenge in the United States.

  The airlines (of course!) lost his bags. The two bags included not only the POS board but all the tools the technician needed to install it. The fact that the part was insured meant little to the expedition, which was spending many thousands of dollars a day and only had use of the plane for a strictly limited period of time. The flustered engineer arrived in Roatán on Tuesday morning with little more than the clothes on his back.

  Desperate and futile phone calls to United and TACA airlines took up all of Tuesday. They learned the bags had arrived in Dulles Airport but had failed to be transferred onto the flight to San Salvador and then Roatán. They seemed to have vanished in Dulles. Then, as the frenzy of phone calls continued into Wednesday afternoon, the bags unexpectedly arrived at the Roatán airport. Virgilio Paredes went with Steve to the airport to speed them through Honduran customs. He did a masterful job of intimidation, waving about the president’s official card, and the bags sailed through and were rushed to the Cessna at the far end of the airport tarmac. It took the technician and Juan Carlos two hours to install the part and get the lidar machine working again. As they arrived back at the Parrot Tree, elated that the expensive, five-day delay was over, United Airlines called to once again say that, despite a most diligent effort, they were terribly sorry but they had been unable to trace the lost bags.

  The mission resumed the next morning, on Thursday, with overflights of T2 and T3. They went flawlessly. Once again we gathered in Michael Sartori’s bungalow to look over the images on his laptop. And once again we were absolutely floored: T3 contained an even larger set of ruins than T1. T2 also revealed enigmatic, man-made features that were harder to interpret. Some guessed they might be quarries or fortifications.

  In his quixotic search for the mythical White City, Elkins and his team had found not one large site but two, apparently built by the almost unknown civilization that once inhabited Mosquitia. But were they cities? And could one of these actually be the White City, the Lost City of the Monkey God? This, however, was the wrong question—it was clear to everyone by this point that the White City was a conflation of stories and probably did not exist in its described form. Like most legends, however, it was anchored in truth: The lidar discoveries had confirmed that Mosquitia had indeed been the territory of a great and mysterious civilization that built many large settlements before it disappeared. It was exactly as Cortés had written five centuries ago: This land had been home to “very extensive and rich provinces.” But what had caused it to vanish so suddenly and completely?

  CHAPTER 12

  There is a big city here.

  On Friday, Áfrico Madrid arrived in Roatán along with a group of Honduran officials. They crowded into Sartori’s room to examine the images on his screen. That evening, Madrid called President Lobo at home to report that he believed Ciudad Blanca had been found. When he heard the news, Lobo told me later, he was “completely speechless.” He said, “This finding will contribute to all of humanity, not just Honduras.” Just how important it was would have to await a ground expedition, but it was clearly one of the major archaeological discoveries of the new century.

  Both men credited the hand of God; after all, Mabel Heinicke had approached them in church at the very moment when the new administration was being formally blessed. “There are no coincidences,” Madrid said to me. “I think that God has extraordinary plans for our country, and Ciudad Blanca could be one of them.” The discovery, he believed, was the beginning of a change in Honduras: “It will put Honduras on the map in terms of tourism, scientific research, history, and anthropology.”

 
; A celebratory dinner was held at a long table set up on the beach, with flaming torches, speeches, and toasts.

  After the mapping of T3, the two-week lidar expedition ended and Chuck Gross departed for Houston in the sturdy little Skymaster packed with all its classified technology. Steve and Juan Carlos were summoned to the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to present the discovery at a cabinet meeting, which was televised live to the nation. A press conference followed on the palace steps. A press release, issued jointly by Elkins’s team and the Honduran government, announced the discovery of “what appears to be evidence of archaeological ruins in an area long rumored to contain the legendary lost city of Ciudad Blanca.” The careful qualification in the statement was lost on the popular press, which announced with huge fanfare that the actual Ciudad Blanca had been found.

  While Hondurans celebrated, a small number of American archaeologists greeted the news with criticism and anger. In two postings on the Berkeley Blog, Professor Rosemary Joyce, a highly respected authority on Honduran prehistory at UC Berkeley, denounced the project as “big hype.” She wrote: “The Honduran press began trumpeting, yet again, the discovery of Ciudad Blanca, the mythical White City supposedly located somewhere in eastern Honduras.” She was also critical of lidar as an archaeological tool. “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.”

  I called up Dr. Joyce a few days after my return to the States to hear her views in more detail. She told me that when she heard the news, she was furious. “This is at least the fifth time someone’s announced they’ve found the White City,” she said, apparently conflating the sensational Honduran press reports, which claimed we had found the White City, with the expedition’s carefully hedged press release. “There is no White City. The White City is a myth, a modern myth, largely created by adventurers. I’m quite biased against this group of people because they are adventurers and not archaeologists. They’re after spectacle. Culture is not something you can see from the lidar plane or from thousands of feet up. There’s this thing we call ‘ground truthing.’”

  I mentioned that the team did intend to ground-truth everything, and that they were looking for an archaeologist to help interpret the findings, but she seemed unmollified. I asked her if she would be willing to look at an image of T1 and give me her interpretation of it. At first she said no. But when I pressed her, she reluctantly agreed. “I’ll look at it, but I may not call you back.”

  I e-mailed her a lidar image of a portion of T1. She called back immediately. Yes, she said, this was an archaeological site, and not a small one. (I had sent her only a tiny section of T1.) She could see “three major clusters of larger structures,” as well as “a plaza, a public space par excellence, and a possible ball court, and many house mounds.” She guessed that the site dated from the Late- or Post-Classic period, between AD 500 and 1000. Nevertheless, she closed the call with another blast at the expedition: “It’s infuriating to see archaeology portrayed as a kind of treasure hunting.”

  Despite Professor Joyce’s concerns, Elkins and Benenson were determined to establish the discovery’s archaeological legitimacy. They looked for an archaeologist who could study the lidar images and figure out more precisely what they represented. They needed someone who was not only a Mesoamerican specialist but also an expert in lidar interpretation. They found the right combination in the person of Chris Fisher, a professor of anthropology at Colorado State University. Fisher had worked with the Chases on the Caracol lidar project, had coauthored the scientific paper with them, and had been the first archaeologist to use lidar in Mexico.

  Fisher came sideways into archaeology. Growing up in Duluth and then Spokane, he became an accomplished drummer and marched in the Drum Corps International Salem Argonauts. He did a national tour from coast to coast with the drum corps in a decrepit passenger bus whose driver was an ex–Hells Angel who had lost a leg in a motorcycle accident; they slept on the bus, as they traveled at night and performed during the day.

  With aspirations to be a jazz drummer, after high school, instead of going to college he drummed while working at “a bunch of crappy jobs.” When he was offered the coveted position of manager of a 7-Eleven, he had an epiphany: “I said to myself, ‘Holy shit, I’ve got to get to college. I can’t do this for the rest of my life.’” He started as a music major, realized he didn’t have the focus to be a successful jazz drummer, and switched to anthropology. At an archaeological field school, where he helped excavate an archaic site in the middle of a cornfield, he “just absolutely fell in love” with archaeology. He went on to get his PhD, with his dissertation focusing on a site in Michoacán, Mexico. While doing a survey in the area, he came across what looked like the remains of a small pre-Columbian village scattered about an ancient lava bed, called Angamuco, once a settlement of the fierce Purépecha (Tarascan) people, who rivaled the Aztecs in central Mexico from around AD 1000 until the arrival of the Spanish in the early 1500s.

  “We thought we could knock out Angamuco in a week,” he recalled. “We just kept going and going and going.” It turned out to be a huge site. In 2010, Fisher used lidar to map Angamuco. The results were perhaps even more astounding than those at Caracol. The images gathered after flying over Angamuco for just forty-five minutes revealed twenty thousand previously unknown archaeological features, including a bizarre pyramid that, seen from above, is shaped like a keyhole.

  “I almost started crying when I saw the lidar images” of Angamuco, Fisher told me. Not only were they spectacular to him as an archaeologist; he realized they had also changed his professional life. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve just got back ten or twelve years of my life.’ It would have taken me that long to survey those nine square kilometers.”

  Since that time, he had expanded his lidar survey of Angamuco: “I’m scared to say we now know Angamuco covers twenty-six square kilometers [ten square miles]. We’re looking at maybe a hundred or a hundred and twenty pyramids,” along with dense settlements, roads, temples, and tombs. The “small site” turned out to be an immense and important pre-Columbian city.

  Pleased to have Fisher on board, Elkins sent him the lidar maps. Fisher spent six months studying them. In December, in a meeting in San Francisco, he presented his findings to the expedition team. While T1 was imposing, Fisher believed T3 was even more impressive.

  The two ruins were definitely not Maya. They belonged to an ancient culture all of its own that dominated Mosquitia many centuries ago. 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.”

  “There is a big city here [in T3],” Fisher said in the meeting. “It’s comparable in geographic area to the core of Copán,” the Maya city in western Honduras. He displayed a map of the central area of Copán, superimposed on the lidar map of the unknown city in T3; both covered about two square miles. “The scale of the site is amazing,” he told the audience. “These are data that would have taken decades to gather in traditional archaeology.” After further examination of the lidar images of T1, Fisher identified nineteen connected settlements strung along several miles of the river, which he believed were part of a chiefdom ruling the valley.
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br />   Later, Fisher told me the two cities appeared to be larger than anything previously found in Mosquitia. In the images he also identified several hundred smaller sites, from farming hamlets to monumental architecture, canals and roads, and signs of terraced hills. “Each of these areas was once a completely modified human environment,” he said. T2 also presented many intriguing features that were harder to interpret.

  These two cities were not unique. They were similar to other major sites found in Mosquitia, such as Las Crucitas de Aner, the largest ruin in Mosquitia. T1, however, is at least four times bigger than Las Crucitas (based on published maps), and T3 is several times larger than that. (T1 is at least five times larger than Stewart’s site of Lancetillal.) But that, he explained, wasn’t saying much, since no site in Mosquitia had ever been mapped in its entirety. The lidar picks up details, such as terracing and ancient canals, that would be extremely difficult to see any other way, which naturally would make T1 and T3 appear bigger than Las Crucitas—a lidar image of Las Crucitas might show that the city extended over a much larger area than previously known. The lidar maps of T1 and T3 hinted that many Mosquitia sites, almost all of which had been poorly mapped if they had been mapped at all, could be far larger than previously thought: The lidar maps proved that the unnamed civilization that had built T1 and T3 had been widespread, powerful, and successful. Also of immense significance, he said, and extremely rare, was that T1 and T3 gave every appearance of being completely undisturbed and unlooted.

  Fisher noted that, unlike ancient cities such as Copán and Caracol, which were built around a central core, the Mosquitia cities were spread out, “more like LA than New York.” He added, “I hear myself saying this stuff, and I know, I just know, that there’s going to be a firestorm of criticism. But I’ve taught myself how to analyze these data. There aren’t yet a lot of archaeologists who have experience working with lidar.” But in ten years, he predicted, “everyone will be using it.”