The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

  And then, around 1500, this culture collapsed. But unlike the Maya, who experienced a multitiered collapse, with various city-states declining at different times, the Mosquitia civilization vanished everywhere all at once—in a sudden, civilization-wide catastrophe. “We have only a glimpse of this great culture,” said Oscar Neil, “before it vanished in the forest.”

  CHAPTER 21

  The vulture—the symbol of death and transition—was placed in the middle.

  The undisturbed cache of sculptures was an outstanding find—but just how important would only be revealed by excavation. While similar caches of objects had been found in large ruins in Mosquitia going back to the 1920s, not a single one had ever been professionally excavated; archaeology in Mosquitia is, as I’ve noted before, a dangerous, expensive, and arduous activity. By the time archaeologists found most of these caches, they had already been dug into or partially looted. Even the few somewhat in-situ caches still existing today—perhaps four or five—have been irredeemably disturbed. What this means is that the experts have never been able to study them properly and coax them into yielding their secrets, the clues to what makes Mosquitia so special. To date, archaeologists had no idea what the caches were for, why they were created, or what the sculptures meant. Chris hoped that a meticulous, scientific excavation of the cache in T1 might change that.

  When Chris and his team returned to the jungle, they began excavating the cache as soon as the next dry season hit, in January of 2016, and within a month they had uncovered a trove of over two hundred stone and ceramic artifacts, many in fragments, with hundreds more still buried. This was an incredible concentration of wealth piled in an area of only a few hundred square feet—out of an archaeological site several square miles in extent. To the ancient people of Mosquitia, this small place was clearly of supreme ritual importance.

  The cache, Chris concluded, was an offering, a kind of shrine. These were precious objects, carved by artisans out of hard rhyolite or basalt. There were at least five kinds of stone from different areas, suggesting a network of trade in fine stone with other communities. Having no metal tools to chisel with, these ancient sculptors shaped them using a laborious grinding process, using handheld rocks and sand to abrade a block of stone into the desired form. Archaeologists call these “ground stone” objects, as opposed to objects carved using traditional hammers and chisels. A tremendous amount of labor, skill, and artistry went into creating each sculpture. Only a specialized class of artisans could have created them.

  The offerings had been placed in the cache area, at the base of the pyramid, all at the same time, on a floor of red, claylike soil. The clay floor had been specially smoothed and prepared to display these objects. Analysis revealed that it was a type of red earth called laterite, which forms much of the basement soil of the valley—an intriguing echo of Cortés’s Old Land of Red Earth.

  The offering or shrine was far from a disorganized heap: Everything had been carefully arranged on the clay foundation. The pieces had been organized around a key central sculpture: an enigmatic standing vulture with drooping wings. Surrounding that were ritual stone vessels, whose rims were decorated with vultures and snakes. Some vessels had carvings depicting a bizarre, humanoid figure with a triangular head, hollow eyes, and an open mouth, perched on a small, naked male body. Dozens of metates had been arranged around this central cluster of artifacts, including the were-jaguar. Many of them were beautifully made and decorated with dramatic animal heads and tails, the legs and rims incised with glyph-like markings and designs.

  No carbon dating of the cache could be done, as the high acidity and wetness of the jungle environment had destroyed any organic artifacts and bones. But based on style and iconography, the objects date to the Mesoamerican Post-Classic phase, between AD 1000 and circa 1500, also called the Cocal Period by archaeologists who prefer not to use the Mesoamerican dating system for a non-Mesoamerican culture.

  Most of the objects in the cache were metates. Normally the word “metate” describes a stone for grinding corn. But these metates, found not only in Mosquitia but across Lower Central America, are different, and nobody knows exactly what they were for or how they were used. They are indeed shaped like tables or platforms for grinding, and they are found with stone grinding rollers. The puzzle is that most of these metates are too large and awkward to be used for efficient grinding. Archaeologists believe instead that they might have been thrones or seats of power. Pottery figurines have been found that depict people sitting on big metates. That they were designed to resemble real corn-grinding stones might be because corn was sacred in the Americas; a Maya creation myth says that human beings were formed from cornmeal dough. Because metates are sometimes found on top of graves, almost like tombstones, some believe they may have also been used as seats for carrying the dead to their final resting place.

  The triangular-headed humanoid figures found on the rims of some jars in the cache, which Chris and his team fondly called alien babies, presented another conundrum. Chris believes they might depict a “death figure,” perhaps the bundled-up corpse of an ancestor. They might also represent bound captives, ready for sacrifice; captives were often depicted in humiliation with their genitals exposed.

  But these metates and jars might have served an even darker purpose. I sent some of the images to John Hoopes, who is a leading authority on Central American ceramics. Despite being a critic of the project, he was impressed and was willing to share with me his ideas, which he emphasized were speculative. “I think they may also have been grinding bones,” he said, referring to the metates. The Chibchan-speaking people farther south in Costa Rica and Panama, he said, collected trophy heads and bodies. “Perhaps they were using those metates,” he said, “to pulverize heads and bodies” of their enemies as a “way of terminating that individual permanently.” He pointed out that in the Maya realm, when a king was defeated, before being executed he was sometimes forced to witness the killing of his entire family and the desecration of his family’s tombs, in which the corpses were removed and ritually destroyed in a public place. “He sees not only his family being destroyed,” Hoopes said, “but his entire dynasty being erased.” Some metates in Costa Rica, he noted, are decorated with tiny trophy heads, which might connect them to ceremonies of bone grinding and erasure. The depiction of what look like bound captives on some jars supports this idea.* Eventually the jars and metate surfaces will undergo “residue analysis,” which could determine what offerings might have been inside them, or what substances, if any, were ground up on them.

  I also showed pictures of some of the artifacts to Rosemary Joyce, another critic willing to share her thoughts. Joyce is a leading authority on iconography in pre-Columbian Honduran art, and she disagreed with all the above. The humanoid figure, she said, is not a body bundled for burial or a captive. The key, she points out, is that the figure appears to have an erection. This, she said, is typically how monkeys are portrayed in ancient Honduran pottery: shown as part human and part animal, with round circles for eyes and mouth—and an erection. In the mythology of some indigenous tribes in Honduras, monkeys were the first people, banished into the forest when humans arrived. Monkeys played a central role in the creation of the world and in Honduran stories and myth. This is probably where the idea of a “City of the Monkey God” came from; some early reports from explorers say the Indians told them stories of monkey gods and half-monkey, half-human beings living in the forest, who terrorized their ancestors, raiding villages and stealing human women to maintain their hybrid race.

  The cache is rich in animal imagery: vultures, snakes, jaguars, and monkeys. Joyce explained that, throughout the Americas, traditional shamans and priests claim special relationships with certain animals. The “were-jaguar” head is a classic example of half-human, half-animal beings portrayed in ancient pottery and sculpture. According to creation stories and myths, jaguars, monkeys, vultures, and snakes were all seen as animals with great power, and were adopted
by shamans as their avatars or spiritual doppelgängers.

  Each species of animal has a spiritual being, a “master,” who watches over and protects them. The human hunter must appease this master of animals in order to successfully hunt that particular kind of animal. After killing it, the hunter must ask forgiveness of the master and make an offering. The master ensures that human hunters do not wantonly kill the animals under his protection, and he rewards only those hunters who are respectful, observe the rituals, and take just what they need.

  A shaman who has adopted an animal as his power spirit can communicate (sometimes using hallucinogens) with that master. This is where the shaman’s power comes from: his ability to transform himself into a were-jaguar, for example, and communicate with the master of jaguars. Through the master he can influence all jaguars in the realm. Each master of animals acts as a spiritual channel to his particular species. Given this, many anthropologists believe the metates with animal heads were seats of power used by shamans or holy lords as a way to move between the earthly and spiritual planes, a doorway to the power of their particular animal.

  According to Joyce, the vulture that was found in the place of honor at the center of the T1 cache, its wings hanging down like arms, is a human who has become part vulture, a shaman who has been transformed into his spirit animal. In Central American pottery and sculpture, vultures were often shown feasting on human corpses or guarding the severed heads of enemies killed in battle. And since vultures were believed to have the ability to cross from the terrestrial to the heavenly realm, the central vulture may be associated with death, transfiguration, and the transition to the spirit world. All this suggests that the meaning of the cache somehow involved death and transition. But the death and transition of whom, or what?

  The motifs carved on some of the metates provide another clue. Joyce interprets the double spiral motif on one T1 metate as representing the mist that emerges from caves in the mountains, which symbolize ancestral origin places. The crossed bands, she says, appear to show entry points into the sacred earth: doorways to a place of origin or birth. The “Celtic knot” motif so common on the T1 artifacts is a quincunx, a geometric arrangement representing the four sacred directions and the center point of the world—a symbol of the universe itself. (The metates also display many additional, puzzling motifs that could be some form of idiographic writing, yet to be deciphered.)

  Following this line of reasoning, it would appear that the focus of the cache was on birth, death, and transition to the spirit world. But why would the people of this city leave in this place such a concentrated mass of sacred and powerful objects, probably owned by the ruling elite, the shamans and holy lords?

  Chris made two key findings that helped unlock this mystery. The first is that this was not an accumulation of offerings deposited over many years or centuries: They had all been left at the same time. The second clue is even more telling: Most of the objects were broken. Were these artifacts broken naturally over the centuries by giant forest trees falling on them? Or were they deliberately broken? In the cache, Fisher and his team found a massive mano or grinding roller carved out of basalt and polished. It is over three feet long, an awkward size and too finely finished to have been useful for actual grinding, indicating it was a ritual object. Even though it is anything but fragile, it was found shattered into six pieces. Mere falling trees are not likely to have broken up this stone so thoroughly. Nor does it seem possible, by sheer numbers, that so many of the other artifacts made out of hard basalt could have broken naturally over time. These artifacts, Chris concluded, must have been deliberately smashed. They were destroyed for the same reason the pots found in the Cave of the Glowing Skulls had been ritually “killed”; ancient people engaged in this ceremonial destruction at gravesites so that objects could journey with the deceased to the afterworld. This was true not just of pots and artifacts, but also involved the ritual destruction of sacred buildings, and even roads. In the American Southwest, for example, parts of the great Anasazi road system and its way stations were closed in the thirteenth century by burning brush and smashing sacred pots along its length, when the ancestral Pueblo people abandoned the region.

  Taken together, these clues imply the cache was assembled during a ritual closing of the city at the time of its final abandonment. In this scenario, the last remaining inhabitants of the city gathered up all their sacred objects and left them as a final offering to the gods as they departed, breaking them to release their spirits.

  It’s reasonable to think that the other caches of artifacts noted in Mosquitia may have been left for the same purpose, during the abandonment of those settlements. It seems that a civilization-wide catastrophe involving the “death” of all these cities occurred at approximately the same time, around 1500—the time of the Spanish conquest. Yet the Spanish never conquered the region; they never explored or even penetrated these remote jungles.

  Which leads us to the overwhelming question: If not because of Spanish invasion or conquest, why was the city and the rest of Mosquitia abandoned? The organized cache suggested the last inhabitants simply walked away from their jungle home, going to parts unknown, for reasons unknown. For the answer to these mysteries, we have to revisit the legend, and the curse, of Ciudad Blanca.

  CHAPTER 22

  They came to wither the flowers.

  The myths of the White City, the City of the Monkey God, a Casa Blanca or Kaha Kamasa, have a similar arc: There was once a great city in the mountains struck down by a series of catastrophes, after which the people decided the gods were angry and left, leaving behind their possessions. Thereafter it was shunned as a cursed place, forbidden, visiting death on those who dared enter.

  A legend, certainly, but legends are frequently based on the truth, and this one, so persistent and long-lasting, is no exception.

  To dig the truth out of the myth, we have to go back in time, to the discovery of the New World by Europeans. In October of 1493, Columbus set sail on his second voyage to the New World. This expedition was very different from the first. That one, with three ships, had been a voyage of exploration: This one was primarily aimed at subjugation, colonization, and conversion. Columbus’s enormous flotilla on that second voyage consisted of seventeen ships carrying fifteen hundred men and thousands of head of livestock, including horses, cattle, dogs, cats, chickens, and pigs. But on board those ships was something far more threatening than soldiers with steel arms and armor, priests with crosses, and animals that would disrupt the New World ecology. Columbus and his men unwittingly carried microscopic pathogens, to which the people of the New World had never been exposed and against which they had no genetic resistance. The New World was like a vast, tinder-dry forest waiting to burn—and Columbus brought the fire. That European diseases ran rampant in the New World is an old story, but recent discoveries in genetics, epidemiology, and archaeology have painted a picture of the die-off that is truly apocalyptic; the lived experience of the indigenous communities during this genocide exceeds the worst that any horror movie has imagined. It was disease, more than anything else, that allowed the Spanish to establish the world’s first imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol, the “empire on which the sun never sets,” so called because it occupied a swath of territory so extensive that some of it was always in daylight.

  Columbus had boasted on his first voyage that “no one had been sick or even had a headache,” except for an old man with kidney stones. The second voyage, carrying soldiers from different parts of Spain and teeming cargo of livestock, was a Noah’s ark of pestilence. Even during the Atlantic crossing, hundreds of men and animals on board Columbus’s flotilla began to sicken. When they reached the outer islands of the Caribbean, the ships, carrying their ripe payload of disease, made a grand tour of the islands, landing on Dominica, Monserrat, Antigua, and other islands of the Lesser Antilles before sailing on to Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, where most of the men disembarked. Even while he and his men were getting sicker, Columbu
s took a smaller fleet that then explored Cuba and Jamaica before returning to Hispaniola.

  Columbus’s first descriptions of Hispaniola reveal a wondrous and fertile place, an island “larger than Portugal with twice the population,” which he extolled as “the most beautiful land I have ever seen.”* Hispaniola (today divided between the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) was richly inhabited by Taíno Indians, but how many is disputed by historians. Bartolomé de las Casas, the early Spanish chronicler who wrote a largely eyewitness account of the colonization of the Indies, said that the Indian population of Hispaniola when Columbus arrived was about a million, which he later revised upward to three million. Many modern historians believe las Casas exaggerated the numbers and that the actual population was perhaps around half a million. Regardless, Hispaniola and all the big islands of the Caribbean were astoundingly prosperous. In nearby Jamaica, Columbus encountered “all the coast and land filled with towns and excellent ports” where “infinite numbers of Indians followed us in their canoes.”

  All that was about to change.

  On that fateful second voyage, Columbus himself became so ill that he almost died, and for weeks he stopped writing in his log. The flotilla reached Hispaniola on November 22, 1493, and reestablished a Spanish settlement to replace the one that had been destroyed by Indians in their absence. Many of the Spanish by this time had fallen sick, and quite a few had died, due to the unsanitary conditions on board ship and the impossibility of escaping contagion. In a few years, fully half of Columbus’s fifteen hundred soldiers would be dead of disease. But that was nothing compared to what happened to the native populations.