The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(52)
The Honduran military flew Larsen into the valley, where he did a five-mile transect, explored the ridges, and journeyed north and south along the unnamed river. His interest was solely in the biology, not the archaeology.
Larsen was deeply impressed by his visit. “For Central America, it is unique,” he told me, a “pristine, undisturbed forest” with “very old trees” that “has not seen a human presence in a very long time”—perhaps for as long as five hundred years. He said it was a perfect habitat for jaguars, as evidenced by all the tracks and scat everywhere. It was also, he noted, an ideal habitat for many sensitive rainforest animals, especially spider monkeys. “The fact that they’re very abundant is a fantastic indicator of forest health,” he told me. “They are one of the most sensitive species of all. That is a really good sign that there has not been human presence for a while.” He shared photos he had taken of the spider monkeys with the celebrated primatologist Russell Mittermeier. Mittermeier was intrigued, because he felt the markings on these monkeys were unusually white and might indicate they are an unknown subspecies, although he cautioned he would have to observe live specimens to be sure.
This brief exploration impressed Conservation International so much that its vice chair—Harrison Ford, the actor—sent a letter to President Hernández of Honduras praising him on his preservation efforts. Ford wrote that CI had determined it was one of the “healthiest tropical forests in the Americas,” and that the valley of T1 and surroundings were an “extraordinary, globally significant ecological and cultural treasure.”
The night after our emergence from the jungle, Virgilio told me that the president wanted to get the news of our finds at T1 out to the world as soon as possible, before rumors and inaccurate stories leaked out. He asked if National Geographic could post something on their website. The next day, I submitted a short, eight-hundred-word story to the Geographic, which was published on March 2, 2015. The story read, in part:
EXCLUSIVE: LOST CITY DISCOVERED IN THE HONDURAN RAIN FOREST
In search for legendary “City of the Monkey God,” explorers find the untouched ruins of a vanished culture.
An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with dramatic news of the discovery of a mysterious culture’s 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 “White City,” also referred to in legend as the “City of the Monkey God.”
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.
The piece touched a nerve. It went viral and garnered eight million views and hundreds of thousands of social media “shares,” becoming the second most popular article National Geographic had ever published online. The story was picked up and became front-page news in Honduras and across Central America. Inevitably, many news outlets reported that the White City had been found.
President Hernández ordered a full-time military unit to the site to guard it against looters who might have figured out its location. Several weeks later, he helicoptered in to see it first-hand. After he came out, he pledged that his government would do “whatever it takes” to protect the valley and the surrounding region. He promised to halt the illegal deforestation that was creeping toward the valley. “We Hondurans,” the president said in his speech, “have the obligation to preserve our culture and ancestral values. We must get to know and learn from the cultures that came before us; these are our ancestral fathers who enriched our nationality. For this reason my government will do whatever it takes to begin the investigation and exploration of this new archaeological discovery.”
Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont who takes a special interest in Honduras, gave a speech on the Senate floor calling for the United States to support Honduran efforts to “secure and preserve” the site of T1.
While this was going on, controversy erupted. Christopher Begley of Transylvania University (the archaeologist in Jungleland) and Rosemary Joyce of Berkeley began circulating a letter criticizing the expedition and inviting their colleagues and students to sign it. The letter alleged that the expedition had made “false claims of discovery” by exaggerating the importance of the site; that it had not acknowledged previous archaeological research in Mosquitia; and that it had disrespected indigenous people by failing to recognize that they already knew of the site. It criticized the stories published in National Geographic and the New Yorker, saying they displayed “rhetorical elements that represent antiquated and offensive, ethnocentric attitudes” that were “at odds with anthropology’s substantial efforts at inclusion and multivocality.” They were concerned about language that felt like a throwback to the bad old colonialist, Indiana Jones days of archaeology.
The letter made some valid points. There are certain phrases associated with the archaeology of the past that the profession has now banished. The sad truth is that, until recently, many archaeologists were shockingly insensitive and arrogant in the way they conducted fieldwork, riding roughshod over the feelings, religious beliefs, and traditions of indigenous people. They dug up burials without permission, sometimes looting the graves of the freshly interred. They put human remains and sensitive grave goods on public display in museums. They hauled off sacred objects to which they had no legal right of ownership. They talked about “prehistoric” Indians as if they had no history until the Europeans arrived. They lectured native people on what their past was and where they came from, dismissing as myths their own origin beliefs. They claimed to have “discovered” sites that were already well known to native people. The ultimate offense was the idea that Europeans “discovered” the New World to begin with, as if the people living here didn’t exist before Europeans saw them. Phrases like “lost cities” and “lost civilization” were uncomfortably associated with the archaeology of the past. While I agree with most of this argument and am delighted that modern archaeological vocabulary is increasingly nuanced and sensitive, it poses a challenge for those of us writing about archaeology for a lay audience, since it is nearly impossible to find work-arounds for common words like “lost” and “civilization” and “discovery” without tying the English language up into knots.