The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(55)
The friends climbed up to the cave and ventured inside with flashlights, walking in the shallow stream. The cave was broad and spacious, with a flat floor, offering an easy hike deep into the mountain. About half a mile in, one of them spied a ledge about twelve feet above the cave floor, which looked like it might lead somewhere. They boosted a person up to take a look, and he hauled up another.
To their surprise, the two young men found the ledge littered with pre-Columbian artifacts, including broken pottery. It seemed no one had climbed up there before, at least in recent history. As they searched around for more pottery pieces, they spied another ledge, twenty feet higher up. Beyond that, there appeared to be an enigmatic opening.
Returning three weeks later with a ladder and ropes, they reached the higher ledge. It was indeed the gateway to a new cavern system. And as they stood on its threshold they beheld a mind-boggling sight. As Berg wrote later, “We saw many glimmering bones scattered along the floor of the passageway, most of them were cemented in place, and a number of ceramic and marble vessels. This was all complemented by many spectacular formations, hidden crevices filled with more bones and of ceramics shards in piles of fine dust.” The skulls were strangely elongated and frosted like sugar candy, covered with glittering crystals of calcite.
They had discovered a spectacular ancient ossuary, which would turn out to be one of the most important archaeological finds in Honduras since the discovery of Copán.
By sheer coincidence, the discovery had happened back when Steve Elkins was in Honduras with Steve Morgan, filming and searching for the White City. At that moment, they were shooting the excavation of an archaeological site on a Honduran island called Santa Elena, adjacent to Roatán. Elkins received a radio call from Bruce Heinicke, who had gotten word of the discovery through his grapevine. On the way back from the island in a boat, Elkins and his team excitedly discussed what the crystal-covered skulls might mean. Steve Morgan coined a name for the site: the “Cave of the Glowing Skulls.” Even though it wasn’t entirely accurate (the skulls do not actually glow), once the name was suggested it stuck, and that is how the site is known today.
The young discoverers reported the find to George Hasemann, the director of IHAH at the time. Hasemann had been working with Elkins on the White City project, and the two discussed what to do. Elkins, who by this time was on his way back to LA, wired money to IHAH so that the institute could hire security for the cave to prevent looting and conduct a preliminary exploration. When Hasemann got inside, he too was stunned by what he saw. He and Elkins contacted a renowned Maya cave archaeologist named James Brady. Together, Hasemann and Brady organized a joint Honduran-American exploration of the necropolis, which commenced the following September in 1995, with Brady as the lead archaeologist.
Brady and his team explored the ossuary, which occupied a labyrinth of holes, alcoves, and side caves packed with bones. Deep in the complex, they spied yet another hole in the ceiling of one chamber, climbed up to it, and entered what appeared to be the central burial chamber. It was a cavern one hundred feet long, twelve feet wide, and twenty-five feet high. As they played their lights around the chamber, they saw a breathtaking space of intricate stalactites, dripstone, and translucent sheets of calcite hanging like drapery from the ceiling. Every ledge, crack, and shelf was stacked with human bones and gaping skulls, covered with a hoarfrost of dazzling white crystals. Bones rarely survive long in the tropics, but in this case the coating of calcite had preserved them. “We have never before seen or heard of skeletal material preserved on such a tremendous scale,” Brady wrote. “The archaeological record is laid out like an open book for us to read.”
Placed among the bones were gorgeous artifacts, including delicate marble and painted ceramic bowls and jars, jade necklaces, obsidian knives, and spearpoints. Some pottery bowls had holes punched in the bottom, which was a curious but widespread practice in pre-Columbian America, the ritual “killing” of an object placed in a grave to release its spirit so that it could follow its owner to the underworld.
Brady and his team determined that these stacks of bones were secondary burials. The corpses of the dead had been interred elsewhere and then, when the flesh had decayed, the bones were removed, scraped clean, painted with red ochre, brought to the cave, and piled up with grave goods. Many of the artifacts were later additions, left years later as offerings to the dead.
In the months between the discovery and Brady’s survey, despite security efforts, vandals and looters had decimated many of the deposits. “Even as we were trying to work there,” Brady told me recently, “they were going in and looting it. Each time we would go back, there were pretty dramatic changes in the amount of destruction. They’d been rooting through the skeletal material, breaking it up into little bits, looking for some kind of treasure.”
As spectacular as this find was, the real shock came when the bones were carbon-dated. The oldest ones were three thousand years old, far older than anyone had assumed, and the burials had taken place over a period of a thousand years. That made the ossuary the earliest evidence of human occupation in Honduras and one of the oldest archaeological sites in Central America.
As Brady recalled, a few days into their work “it dawned on me that this was not a Maya burial pattern.” Although the cave was situated on the Maya frontier, it appeared to belong to an entirely different and virtually unknown culture. While the Maya also buried their dead in caves, the way in which these bones were arranged and the kinds of artifacts that had been left with them were different from what one would expect from Maya cave burials. The ossuary was the work of a sophisticated, socially stratified, and artistically advanced culture, one that developed astonishingly early, even before the Maya. Said Brady: “If we only knew who these people were!”