The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story(87)
Bill Benenson, the filmmaker who financed the search for the lost city, exploring the unnamed river in the valley of T1 below the ruins.
Dr. Alicia González, the expedition’s anthropologist, in the Mosquitia jungle, 2015. In the background, from left to right are: Chris Fisher, Anna Cohen, and Andrew Wood.
Chris Fisher exploring the ruins using a Trimble GPS. This photograph was taken in the main central plaza of the lost city, surrounded by mounds and an earthen pyramid. The incredible thickness of the jungle obscured everything.
The “kitchen” area of the expedition’s camp deep in the Mosquitia jungle, 2015. The area was so remote, the animals apparently had never seen people before and wandered about, unafraid.
Honduran TESON Special Forces soldiers accompanied the expedition; they are roasting a deer over the fire in their camp, 2015.
Oscar Neil, chief of archaeology for Honduras, discovered the first altar stone in the ruins a few seconds before this photo was taken in February 2015. The altar is barely visible behind his right hand; it proved to be a large, flat stone placed on three quartz boulders, in a long line of altars alongside the main plaza of the city.
The cache or offering of stone objects, vessels, thrones, and figures, with just the tops visible above the surface of the ground. The excavation of this cache would solve one of the greatest mysteries of this enigmatic civilization: What caused its sudden, catastrophic disappearance five centuries earlier?
The were-jaguar as it first appeared emerging from the ground. Photographer David Yoder risked his life to climb up to the cache at night to photograph the artifacts using a special “light-painting” photographic technique.
Archaeologist Anna Cohen excavates stone vessels at the site of the mysterious cache. Visible here is the so-called “alien baby” stone vessel, which may depict a corpse bound for burial, a captive awaiting sacrifice, or a half-monkey, half-human deity.
The mysterious sculpture placed in the center of the cache found at the base of the central pyramid, which archaeologists believe depicts a shaman in a spiritually transformed state as a vulture.
Deforestation on the way to the valley of T1, primarily clearing land for cattle grazing. One Honduran official estimated that illegal clearcutting would have reached the valley of T1 in fewer than 8 years. The expedition and its discoveries, however, motivated the Honduran government to crack down on deforestation in the Mosquitia region.
President Hernández of Honduras and Steve Elkins after his arrival by helicopter at the site of the lost city, 2016.
Acknowledgments
In addition to the people featured in this book, I would like to thank many others not mentioned in the book who made this project possible.
I would like to express my deep appreciation for the cooperation, permission, and support of the Government of Honduras: in particular, President Porfirio Lobo Sosa; President Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado; Secretary of the Interior and Population áfrico Madrid Hart; Minister of Science and Technology Ramón Espinoza; Virgilio Paredes Trapero, Director of the Honduran Institute for Anthropology and History (IHAH); Oscar Neil Cruz, Chief of the Archaeology Division of IHAH; and archaeologists Ranferi Juárez Silva, Norman Martínez, and Santiago Escobar. I am grateful to Minister of Defense Samuel Reyes and the Armed Forces of Honduras under the command of Gen. Fredy Santiago Díaz Zelaya; Gen. Carlos Roberto Puerto; Lt. Col. Willy Joel Oseguera and the soldiers of TESON, Honduran Special Forces.
I also wish to thank my many fine editors: Millicent Bennett and Melanie Gold at Grand Central Publishing; Alan Burdick and Dorothy Wickenden at the New Yorker; Jamie Shreeve and Susan Goldberg at National Geographic; and Jaime Levine. Special thanks also to Eric Simonoff, Raffaella De Angelis, and Alicia Gordon at William Morris Endeavor; Jeremy Sabloff, Santa Fe Institute; Michael Brown, School for Advanced Research; David Hurst Thomas, American Museum of Natural History; William Fash, Harvard University; the late Evon Z. Vogt, Harvard University; George Rossman, Caltech; Ann Ramenofsky, University of New Mexico; Timothy D. Maxwell, New Mexico Office of Archaeological Studies; Fredrik Hiebert, National Geographic Society; and Robert Crippen, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
I am as always and forever grateful to my friends and colleagues at Hachette Book Group: Michael Pietsch, Jamie Raab, Caitlin Mulrooney-Lyski, Brian McLendon, Deb Futter, Andrew Duncan, Beth de Guzman, Oscar Stern, Shelby Howick, Flamur Tonuzi, and Jessica Pierce. Additional sincere thanks to Barbara Peters, Poisoned Pen Bookstore; Devereux Chatillon; Garry Spire; Maggie Begley; Wendi Weger; Myles Elsing; Roberto Ysais; and Karen Copeland, who keeps it all going. And a very special thanks to my wife, Christine, and Selene, Josh, Aletheia, and Isaac, and my mother, Doffy.
Finally, I would like to express my great appreciation to the National Institutes of Health, which, through its extraordinarily valuable and effective medical research programs, has lifted the burden of sickness and misery from millions of people in America and across the world. I would note that in the past decade, because of ill-advised Congressional budget-cutting, the NIH has seen its financing slashed by over 20 percent, which has compromised and even shut down some of its most important research programs into health issues that affect all of us: infectious disease, cancer, diabetes, stroke, heart disease, arthritis, mental illness, addiction, and so much more. There may be no better use of taxpayer dollars than in funding the NIH; it is a shining example of something our government does extremely well, which because of financial and profit requirements cannot be accomplished by the private sector.