CHAPTER 19

These are our ancestral fathers.

We stepped out of the helicopter into dry heat shimmering off the tarmac. It was a blessed relief from the sticky jungle. The soldiers guarding the airstrip were surprised to see us wet and coated with mud because, they said, it hadn’t rained at all in Catacamas, seventy air miles away. Before allowing us in the van, they politely asked us to hose ourselves off. I picked and scraped the mud from my boots with a stick; even with the hose it took a good five minutes to get the sticky clay off. Back at the hotel I called my wife, took a shower, and donned a fresh outfit. I bundled my stinking clothes in a sack and dropped it off for the hotel laundry, feeling sorry for whoever was tasked with washing them. I lay back on the bed, hands behind my head, my glumness at having to leave T1 tempered by the glorious sensation of being dry for the first time in eight days, even if covered with bug bites.

Eventually I joined Steve by the pool, where we both sank into plastic chairs and ordered frosty bottles of Port Royal. He looked wrung out. “It’s a miracle we all got out of there safely,” he said, dabbing his brow with a napkin. “And nobody was bitten by a snake. But, my God, what an effort! I started with one simple objective: to prove or disprove the legend of Ciudad Blanca. That was the start, but it led to so much more. Maybe that’s what the monkey god wanted, to draw us in.”

“What do you think? Did you prove it?”

“Well, what we proved is that there was a large population in Mosquitia with a sophisticated culture that compares to anything in Central America. If we can work with Honduras to preserve this place, I’ll feel I’ve really accomplished something. It’s a work in progress. This’ll probably go on for the rest of my life.”

That evening, Virgilio joined us at dinner. I asked him about the clear-cutting that checkerboarded the jungle we had flown over. He was shocked and concerned by what he’d seen. He said we had found the site in the nick of time, before deforestation and looting reached it. He had discussed the issue with the president, who was determined to halt and even roll back the illegal deforestation. He spread his hands. “The Honduran government is committed to protecting this area, but it doesn’t have the money. We urgently need international support.”

That support would soon be coming. A year later, Conservation International would investigate the valley as a potential preservation project. The organization sent Trond Larsen, a biologist and director of CI’s Rapid Assessment Program, into T1 to investigate how biologically important the valley was and whether it was worthy of special protection. CI spearheads vital conservation efforts across the globe, working with governments and others to save areas of high ecological importance. It is one of the most effective conservation organizations in the world today, having helped protect 2.8 million square miles of inland, coastal, and marine areas across seventy-eight countries.

The Honduran military flew Larsen into the valley, where he did a five-mile transect, explored the ridges, and journeyed north and south along the unnamed river. His interest was solely in the biology, not the archaeology.

Larsen was deeply impressed by his visit. “For Central America, it is unique,” he told me, a “pristine, undisturbed forest” with “very old trees” that “has not seen a human presence in a very long time”—perhaps for as long as five hundred years. He said it was a perfect habitat for jaguars, as evidenced by all the tracks and scat everywhere. It was also, he noted, an ideal habitat for many sensitive rainforest animals, especially spider monkeys. “The fact that they’re very abundant is a fantastic indicator of forest health,” he told me. “They are one of the most sensitive species of all. That is a really good sign that there has not been human presence for a while.” He shared photos he had taken of the spider monkeys with the celebrated primatologist Russell Mittermeier. Mittermeier was intrigued, because he felt the markings on these monkeys were unusually white and might indicate they are an unknown subspecies, although he cautioned he would have to observe live specimens to be sure.

This brief exploration impressed Conservation International so much that its vice chair—Harrison Ford, the actor—sent a letter to President Hernández of Honduras praising him on his preservation efforts. Ford wrote that CI had determined it was one of the “healthiest tropical forests in the Americas,” and that the valley of T1 and surroundings were an “extraordinary, globally significant ecological and cultural treasure.”

The night after our emergence from the jungle, Virgilio told me that the president wanted to get the news of our finds at T1 out to the world as soon as possible, before rumors and inaccurate stories leaked out. He asked if National Geographic could post something on their website. The next day, I submitted a short, eight-hundred-word story to the Geographic, which was published on March 2, 2015. The story read, in part:

EXCLUSIVE: LOST CITY DISCOVERED IN THE HONDURAN RAIN FOREST

In search for legendary “City of the Monkey God,” explorers find the untouched ruins of a vanished culture.

An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with dramatic news of the discovery of a mysterious culture’s lost city, never before explored. The team was led to the remote, uninhabited region by long-standing rumors that it was the site of a storied “White City,” also referred to in legend as the “City of the Monkey God.”

Archaeologists surveyed and mapped extensive plazas, earthworks, mounds, and an earthen pyramid belonging to a culture that thrived a thousand years ago, and then vanished. The team, which returned from the site last Wednesday, also discovered a remarkable cache of stone sculptures that had lain untouched since the city was abandoned.

The piece touched a nerve. It went viral and garnered eight million views and hundreds of thousands of social media “shares,” becoming the second most popular article National Geographic had ever published online. The story was picked up and became front-page news in Honduras and across Central America. Inevitably, many news outlets reported that the White City had been found.

President Hernández ordered a full-time military unit to the site to guard it against looters who might have figured out its location. Several weeks later, he helicoptered in to see it first-hand. After he came out, he pledged that his government would do “whatever it takes” to protect the valley and the surrounding region. He promised to halt the illegal deforestation that was creeping toward the valley. “We Hondurans,” the president said in his speech, “have the obligation to preserve our culture and ancestral values. We must get to know and learn from the cultures that came before us; these are our ancestral fathers who enriched our nationality. For this reason my government will do whatever it takes to begin the investigation and exploration of this new archaeological discovery.”

Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont who takes a special interest in Honduras, gave a speech on the Senate floor calling for the United States to support Honduran efforts to “secure and preserve” the site of T1.

While this was going on, controversy erupted. Christopher Begley of Transylvania University (the archaeologist in Jungleland) and Rosemary Joyce of Berkeley began circulating a letter criticizing the expedition and inviting their colleagues and students to sign it. The letter alleged that the expedition had made “false claims of discovery” by exaggerating the importance of the site; that it had not acknowledged previous archaeological research in Mosquitia; and that it had disrespected indigenous people by failing to recognize that they already knew of the site. It criticized the stories published in National Geographic and the New Yorker, saying they displayed “rhetorical elements that represent antiquated and offensive, ethnocentric attitudes” that were “at odds with anthropology’s substantial efforts at inclusion and multivocality.” They were concerned about language that felt like a throwback to the bad old colonialist, Indiana Jones days of archaeology.

The letter made some valid points. There are certain phrases associated with the archaeology of the past that the profession has now banished. The sad truth is that, until recently, many archaeologists were shockingly insensitive and arrogant in the way they conducted fieldwork, riding roughshod over the feelings, religious beliefs, and traditions of indigenous people. They dug up burials without permission, sometimes looting the graves of the freshly interred. They put human remains and sensitive grave goods on public display in museums. They hauled off sacred objects to which they had no legal right of ownership. They talked about “prehistoric” Indians as if they had no history until the Europeans arrived. They lectured native people on what their past was and where they came from, dismissing as myths their own origin beliefs. They claimed to have “discovered” sites that were already well known to native people. The ultimate offense was the idea that Europeans “discovered” the New World to begin with, as if the people living here didn’t exist before Europeans saw them. Phrases like “lost cities” and “lost civilization” were uncomfortably associated with the archaeology of the past. While I agree with most of this argument and am delighted that modern archaeological vocabulary is increasingly nuanced and sensitive, it poses a challenge for those of us writing about archaeology for a lay audience, since it is nearly impossible to find work-arounds for common words like “lost” and “civilization” and “discovery” without tying the English language up into knots.

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!”

Chris Fisher told American Archaeology that the charges were “ridiculous.” “Our work has resulted in protection for the area. We’re preparing academic publications on the material. The map digitizes the archaeological features we saw. The overarching goal was to confirm what we saw on the lidar. I don’t think that’s adventuring.” He was particularly dismayed that Begley had called him a “treasure hunter,” the dirtiest insult in archaeology. Chris said to me, “Where are Begley’s peer-reviewed publications? Where’s his scholarship? I can’t find a single peer-reviewed article he’s published. And if he claims he’s visited these ruins, where’s the map? Where’s the site report?” Chris continued: “When you do archaeology, you survey, you make maps, you take photos, notes, et cetera. If he [Begley] had those locations they should have been turned over to the IHAH, as it is their cultural patrimony. To not do so is colonial and unethical.” But in the past twenty years, according to IHAH, Begley had not deposited any reports of his work, in violation of Honduran regulations.

The National Geographic Society posted the expedition’s response: “We hope our colleagues will realize the enormous contribution and attention that this project has brought, not only to the academic community working in the area but to the people and government of Honduras, and we hope that together we will be able to foster and encourage greater academic research in the area.”

Virgilio Paredes, in his capacity as director of IHAH, wrote a letter of support that the expedition posted with the FAQ. In private he was upset at the academic attacks. He told me that he had checked IHAH records and they showed that, indeed, Begley hadn’t pulled an archaeological permit in Honduras since 1996, even though he continued to “illegally” conduct research and exploration, as well as guide celebrities, filmmakers, journalists, and adventure-tourists to remote archaeological sites for pay. When I gave Begley an opportunity to refute that serious charge, in an exchange of e-mails he was unwilling or unable to do so, saying only that I was “being misled.” He wrote in his defense: “All of my trips to Honduras have either had necessary permission or they did not involve any activities that legally or by the regulations of the IHAH would require a permit.” He declined to provide any specifics, and he would not clarify the nature of his work in Honduras since 1996—whether it was archaeological, commercial, or touristic. He shut down our e-mail correspondence by writing: “I hope that this can put an end to this line of inquiry… That is really all I have to say on this matter.”

“They criticized,” Virgilio said to me, “because they were not involved. Come on! They should be saying, ‘How can we get involved and help?’ This is a project for my country, Honduras—for my children’s children.”

Juan Carlos Fernández mused, drily: “They’re upset because we invaded their sandbox.”

Originally it seemed that the contretemps came from a concern about academic purity and incorrect assumptions, whether willful or not, about where the site was located. But I eventually learned that there were deeper reasons for the academic rhubarb, unwittingly revealed to me by one of the letter signers, who asked to remain anonymous. Many of the signatories had been supporters of the Zelaya administration. After Zelaya was deposed in the 2009 military coup, the new government removed the previous director of IHAH, Dario Euraque, and replaced him with Virgilio Paredes. The source complained to me that, because of the coup, the present government of Honduras is illegitimate and Virgilio Paredes “is in charge illegally” and “I will not work with him.” Euraque, who teaches at Trinity College in Connecticut, was one of the leading critics and complained to the Guardian that the expedition was “irrelevant,” a publicity stunt, and he claimed it had “no archaeologists of any name.”

All this made it clear that the protest letter was, in part, a proxy attack on the present Honduran government, an example of how the coup and its aftermath left the Honduran archaeological community angry and divided. We would see more evidence of this when excavations began the following year, reigniting the controversy. Many of the letter signers have found it difficult to let go of the dispute and continue to disparage the project.