The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(53)
But the letter went far beyond a critique over word usage. The accusation that the team was ignorant of—or worse, deliberately ignoring—previous archaeological research in Mosquitia seriously angered some academics. It was also false. Steve Elkins and his researchers had researched archives in both Honduras and the United States, collecting copies of every published and unpublished paper, report, photograph, map, diary, accession record, and scribbled note they could find regarding Mosquitia going back almost a century. And my 2013 New Yorker piece on the lidar discovery featured Begley and his work, extensively quoted Joyce and other archaeologists, and contained an overview of Mosquitia archaeology. The National Geographic reports on the discovery linked to that article. No one had been ignored.
Begley also claimed that nobody from the team had contacted him, but this, too, was not true. Tom Weinberg had in fact enlisted Begley’s help in the late 1990s—as a string of e-mails and reports prove—but Steve later dropped him from the project. After the successful lidar mission in 2012, Begley sent several e-mails to Steve offering his expertise, writing: “I’d be glad to help on the ground truthing and any other way I can.” Steve declined on the advice of others involved with the project—who asked Steve not to include Begley for reasons touched on below.
American Archaeology magazine sent a reporter, Charles Poling, to cover the controversy. He interviewed Begley and several other signers. Begley expanded at length on the accusations in the letter. He said the publicity attending the discovery was not justified. He told Poling: “This site is not actually any different from what archaeologists have found there for years, either in size, or the stone artifacts on the surface. What merits the publicity?” He objected to the involvement of filmmakers in the discovery and called it a “B movie fantasy” that was resurrecting the “trope” of “the big hero explorer.” He said that, while he was not privy to the location of the site, he was nevertheless “certain that local folks know about the site and the area”—and he also suggested that he, himself, had probably explored the ruins. Other signatories were equally dismissive. Joyce told American Archaeology that in her view the expedition was an “adventure fantasy trip.” Mark Bonta, an ethnobotanist and cultural geographer at Penn State University who specializes in Honduras, said about the expedition: “One day it’s this, the next day it’s Atlantis. It’s almost like it’s a reality show.” Another letter signer, John Hoopes, chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Kansas and an authority on ancient Honduran culture, posted on his Facebook page a lidar image of a section of T1 that had been released by UTL, and ridiculed its small size. “Are the ‘lost cities’ in Honduras actually Lilliputian in scale?” he asked sarcastically. Begley and others joined in posting mocking comments on the small size of the site—until Juan Carlos pointed out to Hoopes that he had misread the scale bars on the lidar image by a factor of ten: What he thought was a hundred meters was actually a kilometer.
The American Archaeology reporter pointed out that Begley himself had for years been leading filmmakers and celebrities to sites in Mosquitia, that he had earlier publicized his own search for Ciudad Blanca and the “Lost City,” and that an article on his website referred to him as the “Indiana Jones of archaeology.” How was that any different? Begley responded: “I am not against popular media. I do it, but I do it differently.” He said about the expedition: “That kind of treasure-hunting, lost-city-finding mentality puts archaeological resources at risk.” Begley went on to complain about the expedition in his blog, comparing it to “children playing out a movie fantasy” and saying that “most scholars are disgusted” by the “colonialist discourse.”
The ten PhD scientists who had taken part in the expedition were stunned. The vociferousness of the criticism went far beyond the usual academic tiff or a dispute over language, and they were amazed that these scholars, who had never been to the site and had no idea where it was, would make claims like these with such certainty. But they understood that a letter signed by two dozen professors and students, including respected scholars like Joyce and Hoopes, had to be taken seriously. Seeing that the letter contained errors of fact, Juan Carlos, Chris Fisher, and Alicia González drafted a FAQ about the expedition, trying to respond to their critics. “The ultimate goal of our work is to highlight the rich cultural and ecological patrimony of this endangered region so that international cooperation and resources can be brought to bear to help initiate effective conservation… The team urges those archaeologists and others concerned about Honduras and its unique cultural patrimony to please join us in this crucial effort, which will take the synergy of collaboration and goodwill among all involved.” The letter noted that none of the sites found in T1 or T3 had been “previously registered with the Honduran Government in its database of cultural patrimony.”
A number of news outlets, including the Washington Post and the Guardian (UK) ran articles on the controversy that repeated the charges and quoted Begley and others questioning the significance—and even the very existence—of the find. “Interestingly,” Chris wrote me, “many reporters, after I made them aware of the FAQ, were uninterested in reading it. They only wanted salacious quotes from everyone involved to help ‘fuel’ a controversy.”
“I feel as though we’re on trial,” Alicia González wrote me. “How dare they? Rubbish!”