The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(30)

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.