CHAPTER 12

There is a big city here.

On Friday, Áfrico Madrid arrived in Roatán along with a group of Honduran officials. They crowded into Sartori’s room to examine the images on his screen. That evening, Madrid called President Lobo at home to report that he believed Ciudad Blanca had been found. When he heard the news, Lobo told me later, he was “completely speechless.” He said, “This finding will contribute to all of humanity, not just Honduras.” Just how important it was would have to await a ground expedition, but it was clearly one of the major archaeological discoveries of the new century.

Both men credited the hand of God; after all, Mabel Heinicke had approached them in church at the very moment when the new administration was being formally blessed. “There are no coincidences,” Madrid said to me. “I think that God has extraordinary plans for our country, and Ciudad Blanca could be one of them.” The discovery, he believed, was the beginning of a change in Honduras: “It will put Honduras on the map in terms of tourism, scientific research, history, and anthropology.”

A celebratory dinner was held at a long table set up on the beach, with flaming torches, speeches, and toasts.

After the mapping of T3, the two-week lidar expedition ended and Chuck Gross departed for Houston in the sturdy little Skymaster packed with all its classified technology. Steve and Juan Carlos were summoned to the presidential palace in Tegucigalpa to present the discovery at a cabinet meeting, which was televised live to the nation. A press conference followed on the palace steps. A press release, issued jointly by Elkins’s team and the Honduran government, announced the discovery of “what appears to be evidence of archaeological ruins in an area long rumored to contain the legendary lost city of Ciudad Blanca.” The careful qualification in the statement was lost on the popular press, which announced with huge fanfare that the actual Ciudad Blanca had been found.

While Hondurans celebrated, a small number of American archaeologists greeted the news with criticism and anger. In two postings on the Berkeley Blog, Professor Rosemary Joyce, a highly respected authority on Honduran prehistory at UC Berkeley, denounced the project as “big hype.” She wrote: “The Honduran press began trumpeting, yet again, the discovery of Ciudad Blanca, the mythical White City supposedly located somewhere in eastern Honduras.” She was also critical of lidar as an archaeological tool. “LiDAR can produce images of landscapes faster than people walking the same area, and with more detail. But that is not good archaeology, because all it produces is a discovery—not knowledge. If it’s a competition, then I will bet my money on people doing ground survey… LiDAR is expensive. And I question the value you get for the money it costs… [Lidar] may be good science—but it is bad archaeology.”

I called up Dr. Joyce a few days after my return to the States to hear her views in more detail. She told me that when she heard the news, she was furious. “This is at least the fifth time someone’s announced they’ve found the White City,” she said, apparently conflating the sensational Honduran press reports, which claimed we had found the White City, with the expedition’s carefully hedged press release. “There is no White City. The White City is a myth, a modern myth, largely created by adventurers. I’m quite biased against this group of people because they are adventurers and not archaeologists. They’re after spectacle. Culture is not something you can see from the lidar plane or from thousands of feet up. There’s this thing we call ‘ground truthing.’”

I mentioned that the team did intend to ground-truth everything, and that they were looking for an archaeologist to help interpret the findings, but she seemed unmollified. I asked her if she would be willing to look at an image of T1 and give me her interpretation of it. At first she said no. But when I pressed her, she reluctantly agreed. “I’ll look at it, but I may not call you back.”

I e-mailed her a lidar image of a portion of T1. She called back immediately. Yes, she said, this was an archaeological site, and not a small one. (I had sent her only a tiny section of T1.) She could see “three major clusters of larger structures,” as well as “a plaza, a public space par excellence, and a possible ball court, and many house mounds.” She guessed that the site dated from the Late- or Post-Classic period, between AD 500 and 1000. Nevertheless, she closed the call with another blast at the expedition: “It’s infuriating to see archaeology portrayed as a kind of treasure hunting.”

Despite Professor Joyce’s concerns, Elkins and Benenson were determined to establish the discovery’s archaeological legitimacy. They looked for an archaeologist who could study the lidar images and figure out more precisely what they represented. They needed someone who was not only a Mesoamerican specialist but also an expert in lidar interpretation. They found the right combination in the person of Chris Fisher, a professor of anthropology at Colorado State University. Fisher had worked with the Chases on the Caracol lidar project, had coauthored the scientific paper with them, and had been the first archaeologist to use lidar in Mexico.

Fisher came sideways into archaeology. Growing up in Duluth and then Spokane, he became an accomplished drummer and marched in the Drum Corps International Salem Argonauts. He did a national tour from coast to coast with the drum corps in a decrepit passenger bus whose driver was an ex–Hells Angel who had lost a leg in a motorcycle accident; they slept on the bus, as they traveled at night and performed during the day.

With aspirations to be a jazz drummer, after high school, instead of going to college he drummed while working at “a bunch of crappy jobs.” When he was offered the coveted position of manager of a 7-Eleven, he had an epiphany: “I said to myself, ‘Holy shit, I’ve got to get to college. I can’t do this for the rest of my life.’” He started as a music major, realized he didn’t have the focus to be a successful jazz drummer, and switched to anthropology. At an archaeological field school, where he helped excavate an archaic site in the middle of a cornfield, he “just absolutely fell in love” with archaeology. He went on to get his PhD, with his dissertation focusing on a site in Michoacán, Mexico. While doing a survey in the area, he came across what looked like the remains of a small pre-Columbian village scattered about an ancient lava bed, called Angamuco, once a settlement of the fierce Purépecha (Tarascan) people, who rivaled the Aztecs in central Mexico from around AD 1000 until the arrival of the Spanish in the early 1500s.

“We thought we could knock out Angamuco in a week,” he recalled. “We just kept going and going and going.” It turned out to be a huge site. In 2010, Fisher used lidar to map Angamuco. The results were perhaps even more astounding than those at Caracol. The images gathered after flying over Angamuco for just forty-five minutes revealed twenty thousand previously unknown archaeological features, including a bizarre pyramid that, seen from above, is shaped like a keyhole.

“I almost started crying when I saw the lidar images” of Angamuco, Fisher told me. Not only were they spectacular to him as an archaeologist; he realized they had also changed his professional life. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve just got back ten or twelve years of my life.’ It would have taken me that long to survey those nine square kilometers.”

Since that time, he had expanded his lidar survey of Angamuco: “I’m scared to say we now know Angamuco covers twenty-six square kilometers [ten square miles]. We’re looking at maybe a hundred or a hundred and twenty pyramids,” along with dense settlements, roads, temples, and tombs. The “small site” turned out to be an immense and important pre-Columbian city.

Pleased to have Fisher on board, Elkins sent him the lidar maps. Fisher spent six months studying them. In December, in a meeting in San Francisco, he presented his findings to the expedition team. While T1 was imposing, Fisher believed T3 was even more impressive.

The two ruins were definitely not Maya. They belonged to an ancient culture all of its own that dominated Mosquitia many centuries ago. He concluded that the ceremonial architecture, the giant earthworks, and the multiple plazas revealed in the images suggested that both T1 and T3 were ancient “cities,” as defined archaeologically. He cautioned that this was not necessarily how the average person might define a city. “A city,” he explained, “is a complex social organization, multifunctional; it has a socially stratified population with clear divisions of space, intimately connected to the hinterlands. Cities have special functions, including ceremonial, and are associated with intensive agriculture. And they usually involve major, monumental reconstruction of the environment.”

“There is a big city here [in T3],” Fisher said in the meeting. “It’s comparable in geographic area to the core of Copán,” the Maya city in western Honduras. He displayed a map of the central area of Copán, superimposed on the lidar map of the unknown city in T3; both covered about two square miles. “The scale of the site is amazing,” he told the audience. “These are data that would have taken decades to gather in traditional archaeology.” After further examination of the lidar images of T1, Fisher identified nineteen connected settlements strung along several miles of the river, which he believed were part of a chiefdom ruling the valley.

Later, Fisher told me the two cities appeared to be larger than anything previously found in Mosquitia. In the images he also identified several hundred smaller sites, from farming hamlets to monumental architecture, canals and roads, and signs of terraced hills. “Each of these areas was once a completely modified human environment,” he said. T2 also presented many intriguing features that were harder to interpret.

These two cities were not unique. They were similar to other major sites found in Mosquitia, such as Las Crucitas de Aner, the largest ruin in Mosquitia. T1, however, is at least four times bigger than Las Crucitas (based on published maps), and T3 is several times larger than that. (T1 is at least five times larger than Stewart’s site of Lancetillal.) But that, he explained, wasn’t saying much, since no site in Mosquitia had ever been mapped in its entirety. The lidar picks up details, such as terracing and ancient canals, that would be extremely difficult to see any other way, which naturally would make T1 and T3 appear bigger than Las Crucitas—a lidar image of Las Crucitas might show that the city extended over a much larger area than previously known. The lidar maps of T1 and T3 hinted that many Mosquitia sites, almost all of which had been poorly mapped if they had been mapped at all, could be far larger than previously thought: The lidar maps proved that the unnamed civilization that had built T1 and T3 had been widespread, powerful, and successful. Also of immense significance, he said, and extremely rare, was that T1 and T3 gave every appearance of being completely undisturbed and unlooted.

Fisher noted that, unlike ancient cities such as Copán and Caracol, which were built around a central core, the Mosquitia cities were spread out, “more like LA than New York.” He added, “I hear myself saying this stuff, and I know, I just know, that there’s going to be a firestorm of criticism. But I’ve taught myself how to analyze these data. There aren’t yet a lot of archaeologists who have experience working with lidar.” But in ten years, he predicted, “everyone will be using it.”

I asked Fisher whether the White City had finally been found. He laughed. “I don’t think there is a single Ciudad Blanca,” he said. “I think there are many.” The myth, he said, is real in the sense that it holds intense meaning for Hondurans, but for archaeologists it’s mostly a “distraction.”

Professor Joyce was right about one thing: A site is not really “found” until it is ground-truthed. Elkins and Benenson immediately began planning an expedition to explore either T1 or T3. Fisher lobbied hard for T3, but Elkins felt T1 offered a more compact, complex, and interesting site. The truth was, he had been trying to get into T1 for twenty years; he was not going to stop now.

Elkins and Benenson spent the next two years organizing the expedition to T1 and securing the exploration and filming permits. In 2014, when President Pepe Lobo’s term was up, the former president of Congress, Juan Orlando Hernández, was chosen in fair and monitored elections. Luckily, he was on the same page as his predecessor about the importance of Elkins’s project; if anything, he was even more enthusiastic and made the exploration of the ruins one of the top priorities of his new administration. The permitting process, while as crazy as ever, came to a successful conclusion. Once again Benenson put up his own money—another half million. Most of these funds were to pay for helicopters, the only feasible (and safe) way to travel into the valley of T1. The team then began planning a scientific expedition into one of the most dangerous and remote places on earth. I was fortunate to be invited to join the team, this time as a correspondent for National Geographic magazine.