The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  In AD 426, a ruler named K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’ (Sun-Eyed Resplendent Quetzal Macaw) came down from the Maya city of Tikal, in Guatemala, and seized control of the settlement of Copán in a coup or invasion. He became Copán’s first “Holy Lord” and launched a dynasty of sixteen lords that would elevate Copán into a glorious city dominating the area for centuries.

  Quetzal Macaw and his elite force of Maya warriors imposed themselves on a local population already living in the Copán valley. These original people may have been Chibchan-language speakers related to those in Mosquitia. Archaeological work at Copán suggests that after Macaw’s conquest it was a multiethnic city. Some neighborhoods at Copán had metates decorated with animal heads like those found in Mosquitia. Macaw married a Copán woman, probably the daughter of a local lord, no doubt to secure his legitimacy and form an alliance with the local nobility, just as European kings once did.

  Copán is as far south as the Maya appear to have reached. Perhaps they were stymied by forbidding mountains and jungle. Perhaps they met resistance. As a result, even after the Maya invasion of Copán in the fifth century, Mosquitia was left to develop on its own. The two civilizations were not, however, isolated from each other. On the contrary, there was probably a vigorous trade between them, and possibly even warfare. From many bragging inscriptions of glorious combat and deeds, we know the Maya city-states were belligerent and engaged in frequent battles with each other and with their neighbors. These conflicts only intensified as the wealth and populations of the Maya city-states increased, swelling their hunger for resources.

  In 2000, archaeologists found Quetzal Macaw’s tomb. For centuries, a bend in the Copán River had cut into the central acropolis of the city, and although its course was altered years ago, the old cutbank remained. The erosion had exposed layer upon layer of buildings erected as the city grew. Each main temple at Copán had been built over and around the previous one, creating a series of buildings nested together like Russian matryoshka dolls.

  In a feat of clever detective work, archaeologists located the tomb by examining the cutaway embankment and identifying the original floor of the oldest building platform. They then tunneled in from the cutbank, following the floor, until they came to a filled-in staircase that led up into the original temple, which had been covered over by eight subsequent temples. They cleared the staircase and found at the top a sumptuous burial chamber containing the skeleton of a man. He was about five feet six inches tall and between fifty-five and seventy years old. Inscriptions, grave offerings, and other evidence confirmed this was the tomb of Quetzel Macaw.

  The Holy Lord’s remains were covered with gorgeous jade and shell jewelry, and he wore a peculiar goggle-eyed headdress made of cut shell. His bones showed that he had taken quite a beating over the course of his life: His skeleton was peppered with healed fractures, including two broken arms, a shattered shoulder, blunt trauma to the chest, broken ribs, a cracked skull, and a broken neck. The physical anthropologist who analyzed his remains wrote that, “In today’s world, it would appear that the deceased had survived an auto accident in which he had been thrown from the vehicle.” But in the ancient world, the injuries were probably caused by playing the famed Mesoamerican ball game called pitz in classical Mayan. (Maya warfare, which used piercing weapons such as the spear and atlatl and close-quarter engagement involving thrusting, stabbing, and crushing, would likely have produced a different mix of injuries.) We know from early accounts and pre-Columbian illustrations that the game was extremely fierce. One sixteenth-century friar, a rare eyewitness, spoke of players being killed instantly when the five-pound ball, made of solid latex sap, hit them on a hard rebound; he also described many others who “suffered terrible injuries” and were carried from the field to die later. The ball game was a vital Mesoamerican ritual, and playing it was essential to maintaining the cosmic order and keeping up the community’s health and prosperity. Because most of Quetzal Macaw’s injuries occurred when he was young, before he arrived in Copán, he might have achieved his leadership role by playing the ball game; alternatively, it is possible that he was required to play the game because of his high status. Either way, the burial confirmed he had not ascended dynastically to the throne from a local elite; he was definitely a foreigner to Copán. Symbols on his shield and the Groucho Marx–style goggle-eyed headdress connected him to the ancient city of Teotihuacan, located north of Mexico City, which in his day was the largest city in the New World. (Today it is a magnificent ruin containing some of the greatest pyramids in the Americas.) An analysis of isotopes in his bones, however, showed he had grown up not in Teotihuacan, but probably in the Maya city of Tikal, in northern Guatemala, two hundred miles north of Copán. (Drinking water, which varies from place to place, leaves a unique chemical signature in the bones.)

  Four centuries after Macaw’s rule, at its apex around AD 800, Copán had become a large and powerful city of perhaps 25,000 inhabitants, spread out over many square miles. But all was not well; a creeping rot—environmental, economic, and social—had been undermining its society for some time and would eventually lead to destruction. Scholars have long debated the mystery surrounding the collapse and abandonment of Copán and the other magnificent cities of the Maya realm.

  Skeletons speak with eloquence, and the many graves unearthed at Copán show that after AD 650, the health and nutrition of the common people appeared to decline. This happened even as the ruling classes apparently swelled in size over succeeding generations, with each generation larger than the last—in what archaeologists call the “increasingly parasitic role of the elite.” (We see the same process today in the gross expansion of the Saudi royal family into no fewer than fifteen thousand princes and princesses.) This proliferation of noble lineages may have triggered vicious internecine warfare and killing among the elite.

  Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, argues that the destruction of Copán was caused by environmental degradation combined with royal neglect and incompetence. Beginning around AD 650, the rulers of Copán engaged in a building spree, erecting gorgeous temples and monuments that glorified themselves and their deeds. As is typical of Maya inscriptions, not a single one at Copán mentions a commoner. Working folk had to build all those buildings. Farmers had to feed all those laborers along with the holy lords and nobles. This type of class division usually works when everyone believes they are part of a system, with each person occupying a valued place in society and contributing to the vital ceremonies that maintain the cosmic order.

  In Maya culture, the holy lords had a responsibility to keep the cosmos in order and appease the gods through ceremonies and rituals. The commoners were willing to support this privileged class as long as they kept up their end of the bargain with effective rituals. But after 650, deforestation, erosion, and soil exhaustion began reducing crop yields. The working classes, the farmers and monument builders, may have suffered increasing hunger and disease, even as the rulers hogged an ever-larger share of resources. The society was heading for a crisis.

  Diamond writes: “We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities.” (If this sounds familiar, I would note that archaeology is thick with cautionary tales that speak directly to the twenty-first century.)

  Other archaeologists say this conclusion is too simple, and that the holy lords did indeed see things were going awry. They tried to solve these problems with solutions that had worked in centuries past: increased building projects (a jobs program) and more raiding (resource acquisition), both of which involved moving workers from outlying farms into the city. But this time the old solutions failed. The ill-advised building projects speeded up the deforestation that was already reducing rainfall, and it accelerated
soil loss, erosion, and the silting of precious farmland and rivers.

  A series of droughts between AD 760 and 800 seem to have been the trigger for famine that hit the common people disproportionately hard. It was the last straw for a society teetering on the edge of alienation and conflict. Here was proof the holy lords were not delivering on their social promises. All building projects halted; the last inscription found in the city dates to 822; and around 850, the royal palace burned. The city never recovered. Some people died of disease and starvation, but the majority of the peasant and artisan classes appear to have simply walked away. Over the centuries the region experienced a relentless population decline, and by 1250, the Copán valley had largely returned to jungle wilderness. The same process occurred in the other Maya city-states, not all at once, but in a staggered fashion.

  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 civilization, occupying over ten thousand square miles of eastern Honduras, at the crossroads of trade and travel between Mesoamerica and the powerful Chibchan-speaking civilizations to the south.

  The excavation of T1 is shedding light on this culture, but also deepening its mystery. “There is much we don’t know about this great culture,” Oscar Neil told me. “What we don’t know is, in fact, almost everything.” Only a small number of archaeological sites have been identified in Mosquitia, and none have been fully excavated. The archaeology that has been done is not enough to answer even the most basic questions about the culture. As one archaeologist said, “There aren’t a lot of people who want to undergo the kind of pain it takes to work out there.” Until the lidar images of T1 and T3 were made, not a single large site in Mosquitia had even been comprehensively mapped.

  We do know from recent archaeology in other rainforest environments—such as the Maya lowlands and the Amazon basin—that complex farming societies were able to thrive in even the toughest rainforest areas. Human ingenuity is boundless. Rainforest farmers developed clever strategies for enriching soil. In the Amazon, for example, they overcame the poor rainforest soils by mixing them with charcoal and other nutrients to create an artificial soil called terra preta, or “black earth,” built into raised beds for intensive farming. There may be as much as fifty thousand square miles in the Amazon covered in this artificially enriched black soil—a staggering accomplishment that tells us Amazonia was densely settled in pre-Columbian times. (If a lidar survey were done of the Amazon basin, it would be, without doubt, an absolute revelation.) So far, almost no research has been done on how the people of Mosquitia farmed their rainforest environment. At T1, we found probable irrigation canals and a reservoir that would have helped make farming possible during the quasi-dry season from January to April. But beyond that there is much, much more to be learned.

  The ancient people of Mosquitia were neglected by researchers partly because of their very proximity to the Maya, as John Hoopes acknowledges. “In this area, these people are in the shadow of the Maya,” he told me. “There are only a few really high-profile archaeological cultures in the world: Egypt and the Maya. That draws people and resources away from the surrounding areas.” This disregard, Hoopes feels, has hurt our understanding of the region, which he believes “holds the key in tying together the Americas,” because it occupies the frontier between Mesoamerica and Lower Central and South America.

  Another reason for this neglect is that the jungle-choked mounds in Mosquitia are, at first glance, not nearly as sexy as the cut-stone temples of the Maya or the intricate gold artwork of the Muisca. The people of Mosquitia, even though they left behind impressive stone sculptures, did not erect great buildings or monuments in stone, the kind of structures that become dramatic ruins wowing people five centuries in the future. Instead, they constructed their pyramids, temples, and public buildings out of river cobbles, adobe, wattle and daub, and probably tropical hardwoods. They had gorgeous woods at their disposal such as mahogany, purple rosewood, aromatic cedar, and sweet gum. We have reasons to believe their weaving and fiber technology was truly spectacular. Imagine a temple made out of highly polished tropical hardwoods, with adobe walls that had been skillfully plastered, painted, incised, and decorated, the interiors draped in richly woven and colored textiles. Such temples might well have been just as magnificent as those of the Maya. But once abandoned, they dissolved in the rain and rotted away, leaving behind unimpressive mounds of dirt and rubble that were quickly swallowed by vegetation. In the acidic rainforest soils, no organic remains survive—not even the bones of the dead.

  Most intriguingly, around the time of the fall of Copán, the people of Mosquitia began to adopt aspects of Maya culture.

  The simplest and most convincing theory about how Maya influence flowed into Mosquitia has it that when Copán was struck with famine and unrest, some of the original Chibcha people of Copán simply packed up and left, seeking refuge in Mosquitia where they had linguistic ties and possibly even relatives. We know that most of the population of Copán walked away; Mosquitia was probably one destination. Some archaeologists take this further: They think that during the chaos of the Maya collapse, a group of warriors marched over from Copán and seized control of Mosquitia. As proof they cite the fact that, when the early Spanish arrived in Honduras, they found tribes of Nahua/Aztec-speaking Indians in Honduras southwest of Mosquitia who may have been a remnant of one such invasive group. (Others think those tribes were descended from Aztec traders, not invaders.)

  One of the most intriguing theories about why Mosquitia began to look Maya involves what archaeologists call the “esoteric knowledge” model. In many societies, the elites rule over the common people and get them to do what they want by displaying their sanctity and holiness. This ruling class of priests and lords awe the populace with arcane rituals and ceremonies using secret knowledge. The priests claim, and of course themselves believe, that they are performing rites that are essential to appease the gods and gain divine favor for everyone’s benefit—to avert disaster, sickness, and defeat in battle, while encouraging fertility, rainfall, and bountiful crops. In Mesoamerica and probably also in Mosquitia, these rituals were dramatic and involved human sacrifice. Those noble lords with access to the “ultimate truths” leveraged that knowledge to control the masses, avoid physical labor, and amass wealth for themselves.* Part of the allure and prestige of esoteric knowledge, the theory goes, is its association with distant and exotic lands—in this case, the lands of the Maya. The “Mayanization” of Mosquitia, therefore, may not have required an invasion; it might instead have been a method for local elites to gain and hold supremacy over the common folk.

  The city of T1 at the height of its power would have been impress
ive indeed. “Even in this remote jungle,” Chris Fisher said to me, “where people wouldn’t expect it, there were dense populations living in cities—thousands of people. That is profound.” T1 consisted of nineteen settlements distributed throughout the valley. It was an immense human-engineered environment, in which the ancient Mosquitia people transformed the rainforest into a lush, curated landscape. They leveled terraces, reshaped hills, and built roads, reservoirs, and irrigation canals. In its heyday T1 probably looked like an unkempt English garden, with plots of food crops and medicinal plants mingled with stands of valuable trees such as cacao and fruit, alongside large open areas for public ceremonies, games, and group activities, and shady patches for work and socializing. There were extensive flower beds, because flowers were an important crop used in religious ceremonies. All these growing areas were mixed in with residential houses, many on raised earthen platforms to avoid seasonal flooding, connected by paths. “Having these garden spaces embedded within urban areas,” said Fisher, “is one characteristic of New World cities that made them sustainable and livable.”

  Even the vistas were tended, with view lines opened up to sacred architecture. The pyramids and temples needed to be seen from afar, so the people could appreciate their power and watch important ceremonies. The entire effect of all this might have been something like Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for Central Park, only wilder.

  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.