Lost City of the Monkey God
The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston
This fascinating little book recounts the discovery and preliminary excavation in 2015 of “T1”, a large ancient “lost” city in the mountains of Mosquitia in Honduras (the latter was christened thus by Columbus because of the depth of the water just offshore from the coast), by a team of adventurers, archeologists and LIDAR experts.
Key Points:
Legends are legends, but they often have a seed of truth in them. There had been stories of a lost “White City” or “City of the Monkey God” told for generations in Honduras.
A Journalist-adventurer cum goldminer claimed to, and a geologist actually did find it in the 60s. Good archival research de-bunked some of the former’s claims and pretty much proved the latter’s. Steve Elkins arranged financing for and led the expedition that Lost City recounts.
This is a great example of the application of new technology (LIDAR) to an exploration problem, in this case the search by archeologists for ruins concealed by thick tropical vegetation.
This book reinforced my impression that tropical jungles are about the least hospitable environment for human habitation on the planet. Between venomous snakes, biting insects and the diseases they carry, not to mention larger predators, like big cats, they’re no place for this cowboy.
Leismaniasis is a horrid disease and very difficult to cure. Thank God, I never picked it up when I was working in the Amazon. Many of the expeditionaries did and suffered mightily through the treatment.
Preston speculates that the catalyst for the abandonment of Mosquitia in the early 16th C may have been European diseases, which arrived there well before the actual Europeans, carried by trade from the Caribbean, where they had played a bigger role in wiping out the indigenous population than European arms.
The other big theme in this book is the collision of politics and archeology, as in Childs’ and Roberts’ books about Anasazi archeology in the SW US. Specifically the hard-left “indigenist” brand of archeology (which claims to speak for native peoples) that stigmatizes the Big Expedition-Lost City-Indiana Jones branch as another manifestation of imperialist/capitalist neo-colonial machismo, etc. I get the sense that a lot of this is pure professional jealousy. Also, in the specific case of Hondouras, in 2009 a left-wing president, Manuel Zelaya, had just been ousted and a center-right gov’t taken over, with whom Steve had negotiated the permits for the expedition, which compounded the ire of Zelaya’s coreligionists in academia the USA.
