CHAPTER 26 
La Ciudad del Jaguar
After our expedition departed the valley of T1 in February 2015, the ruins lay undisturbed for almost a year. A rotating contingent of Honduran soldiers remained in our old campsite, guarding the city. Within weeks, soldiers began coming down with leishmaniasis, something that the Honduran military had not experienced elsewhere in the country. The military considered pulling them out, but in the end it dealt with the problem by rotating the soldiers frequently in hopes that would minimize exposure. The soldiers cleared the brush and vegetation in the camp area, leaving only the trees, in an effort to reduce the habitat for sand flies. To make the rotations simpler and quicker, the military built a barracks at the Aguacate airstrip.
The excavation of the artifact cache at T1 became a priority. Even Chris understood that leaving everything in the ground was not a long-term option. With archaeological looting a widespread problem in Honduras, and the cache worth millions of dollars, it would have to be guarded indefinitely by the military. That was not realistic, given the expense, the frequent changes in government, and the raging leishmaniasis that made a permanent human presence in the valley problematic.
At the same time he fought his grueling battle with leish, Chris prepared a plan of work and began assembling an expert team of archaeologists and technicians to excavate the cache. The idea wasn’t to remove the entire offering, but only to take out artifacts that were sticking out of the ground and in danger of being disturbed. He planned to leave the rest of the site covered and hidden so the material remaining underground would be safe. He hoped a partial excavation would help us begin to understand the meaning of the cache and any answers it held to the many mysteries surrounding this culture. (Later, Honduran archaeologists continued the excavation and have at the time of writing recovered over five hundred artifacts.)
The academic controversy about the expedition did not die down, as many on the team had hoped it would. Many months after the 2015 expedition, Juan Carlos gave a talk in Tegucigalpa about the expedition’s lidar work, and a group of protestors showed up to heckle. Their leader, Gloria Lara Pinto, a professor at Universidad Pedagógica Nacional Francisco Morazán in Tegucigalpa, arrived late. She stood up during the question-and-answer period and challenged Juan Carlos, saying that he was not an archaeologist and had no business passing himself off as one, and that his talk (which was for a general audience) lacked scientific rigor. Juan Carlos pointed out that he had made precisely those disclaimers at the beginning of his lecture and that it was a shame she had arrived late and missed them. “I acknowledged,” he told me later, “that I was not an archaeologist or an anthropologist, but as a Honduran I do have the right and the obligation to understand more of my country’s geography and history, and as a PhD researcher I do have the basic tools to do historical research.” After his response, he said, the audience booed Professor Pinto and her group of hecklers.
The cost of the return trip and the excavation amounted to almost a million dollars, much of it again due to the expense of operating helicopters. With Chris’s help, Steve Elkins and Bill Benenson worked to raise the funds, receiving contributions from the Honduran government and the National Geographic Society. National Geographic magazine once again hired me to cover the team’s work. I was apprehensive about going back but intensely curious to see what was in the cache. Wisely or not, I was no longer worried about leish: I was, in fact, far more concerned about poisonous snakes and dengue fever. The size, power, and lethality of that first fer-de-lance we encountered had been an experience I would never forget. Instead of reusing my old Kevlar snake gaiters, I went online and bought a $200 pair of snake guards said to be the finest made. The manufacturer had posted a video of the snake guards repelling repeated strikes from a big diamondback rattler. I called and asked if they’d ever tested them against a fer-de-lance, and I was told they had not, nor would they guarantee them against that kind of snake. I bought them anyway.
I also had a plan about dengue: I would spray my clothes with DEET inside and out, strip twice a day and cover myself with DEET, and I would take refuge in my tent at sunset, before the mosquitoes came out, and not emerge until after sunrise.
In early January 2016, Chris Fisher and his team of archaeologists, Honduran and American, arrived at the site, set up a base camp, and flew in their supplies. They were working with the latest high-tech archaeological equipment, including tablet computers reinforced and cased to withstand the rigors of the jungle, state-of-the-art GPS units, and a portable lidar machine operated by Juan Carlos. Remarkably, neither Juan Carlos nor anyone else who had been struck by disease on the original expedition was deterred from coming back, except Oscar Neil, who (for understandable reasons) informed the IHAH that he would not set foot in the jungle again.
Within a week, Fisher and his team were ready to begin work at the cache. Breaking ground in the lost city generated much excitement in the Honduran press, although so far, the location had successfully remained under wraps—a surprise, given how many people now knew about it. President Hernández announced to the country that he, personally, would fly in to the site to remove the first two artifacts and carry them to the new laboratory being built at the Aguacate airstrip. Aside from taking a deep personal interest in the project, the president wanted to put out some good news for the country.
As was perhaps to be expected, the flurry of news stories about the excavation revived the academic quarrel and also inflamed a segment of Honduras’s indigenous community. The project’s critics once again took to the blogs and complained to the press. The former head of the IHAH, Dario Euraque, told the website Vice.com that the archaeologists were taking credit for a discovery that was “not theirs” and that they had offended indigenous groups by engaging in “racist dialogue.” He said that the publicity had left the ruins open to looting and that he was very sad to see Honduras turned “into a reality show.” Some archaeologists and others accused President Hernández of exploiting the find to distract public attention from corruption, human rights abuses, and the murder of environmental activists. They condemned the expedition for cooperating with such a government.*
On January 13, a group of indigenous Honduran leaders, los hijos de la Muskitia or the Children of Mosquitia, wrote an open letter criticizing the government and claiming the excavation of T1 violated Indian treaties. The communiqué had a long list of demands, and it objected to the use of the term “Monkey God,” which the writers considered “denigrating, discriminatory, and racist.” The letter concluded, “We, the sons of the Indigenous Miskitu Community… demand the immediate return of all artifacts looted from our sacred site called the White City.” The letter included a map of Miskito territory that seemed to swallow the traditional lands of other indigenous Indian communities, such as the Pech and Tawahka, who are believed to be the actual descendants of the ancient people of Mosquitia. The issue of indigenous rights in Honduras is not simple; Honduras is a robust mestizo society in which most citizens, rich and poor, have a large proportion of Indian ancestry. The Miskito people are themselves of mixed Indian, African, Spanish, and English ancestry with roots not in the interior mountains where T1 is located, but along the coast.
When I asked Virgilio about the letter, he said the government was well aware of it, had long been expecting it, and would handle it. (As far as I could ascertain, the government handled it by ignoring it.)
John Hoopes organized a talk at his university on what he called “lost city hucksterism” entitled “The Lost City That Isn’t.” When I asked him what the talk would cover, he explained to me the discussion would be mostly aimed at helping students “think about how ‘hot’ issues such as those of colonialism, white supremacy, hypermasculinity, fantasy and imagination, [and] indigenous rights… intersect with the narratives that have been and are being spun about the White City.”
In mid-January I flew to Tegucigalpa to reenter the jungle and report on the excavation for National Geographic. I was curious to see how the president, his entourage, and the press were going to manage the snake- and disease-infested jungle. I also found myself stewing over the thought that the breathtaking perfection of the rainforest might have been ruined and the area degraded by human occupation, in which I had played a role.
My return trip to T1 began the morning of January 11, 2016, when a driver met me before dawn in Tegucigalpa for the long, overland trip to the airstrip, where an 8:00 a.m. military flight would take me into the valley. Virgilio had warned me to pack everything required for an overnight stay in the valley, including food and water, because helicopter transportation was uncertain and I would probably have to spend at least one night out there, maybe more. I tossed my overstuffed backpack into the back of the old pickup truck with a cracked windshield and government logos emblazoned on the side. We took off at high speed, the truck zooming through the deserted, postapocalyptic streets of the capital. We were soon out of the city and roaring up and down dizzying mountain roads. An hour later, high in the mountains, we were enveloped in a dense fog. The yellow lights of the oncoming cars and trucks loomed ominously, flaring up like fireworks, and then thundered past, the taillights winking out in the inky dark. As the light of dawn crept up, tatters of fog clung to the hillsides and filled the lowlands with mist. The Honduran interior is spectacularly beautiful and rugged, one mountain chain after the other, separated by deep green valleys. As we went up and down, the enchanted names of the villages flashed past—El Mago, Guaimaca, Campamento, Lepaguare, Las Joyas. They were the same towns we had passed a year before, but this time, shrouded in early morning mist, they looked otherworldly and aroused in me a sense of the inscrutability and “cognitive dissonance” of Honduras today.
We arrived at the Aguacate airstrip well in time for the flight, which was delayed by many hours. I was surprised to see how quickly the shabby terminal building had been smartly renovated into an archaeological laboratory. Next to that stood a brand-new military barracks, pale yellow cinder blocks with a corrugated tin roof—quarters for the soldiers rotating in and out of the site.
The Honduran helicopter, an olive-green Bell UH-1, was waiting on the tarmac. We eventually took off and an hour later we cleared the notch, the magical vale of T1 once more unrolling before us, stippled in sunlight. But as we slowed into a hover above the camp, my fears seemed confirmed: From the air the area along the river was unrecognizable. A new and bigger landing zone had been hacked out of the dense vegetation on the opposite side of the river, with a dirt landing pad marked with a giant red X in plastic strips.
We landed and I hopped out with my backpack, the chopper soon thundering back into the sky. Everything was different. I picked my way across withered heaps of macheted vegetation and crossed the river on a set of single logs laid in a zigzag fashion. A massive flood had scoured the valley after the 2015 expedition, washing away the old landing zone and turning it into a rocky island in the middle of the river. The flood had also changed the river’s course, carving a new channel closer to the embankment that led up to the camp. Luckily, the archaeological site, situated on the high terraces above the floodplain, had not been affected.
When I climbed the embankment, I was again shocked at the change to our former campsite. All the ground vegetation and small trees had been chopped down and cleared, leaving just the larger trees. It was sunny, open, hot, and trampled. The ineffable mystery of being immersed in the living, breathing rainforest was gone; the area felt shrunken and bedraggled. A year of continuous occupation had taken its toll. No longer were there individual tents and hammocks tucked here and there among the great gloomy trees, each camp hidden in its own glade. Instead, a tent city had been erected. The encampment of the Honduran soldiers stood naked and exposed in the hot sun, a series of green canvas huts and blue tarps erected on wooden poles, wreathed in the smoke of cooking fires. It was safer from snakes, but far less evocative. Walkways of cut bamboo and wooden pallets were laid over the muddy ground, and a generator blatted away. I felt distressed even as I understood these were unavoidable changes, the inevitable result of our expedition’s exploration of the valley. Even the sounds of the jungle were different; the cries and calls were more distant, the wildlife having retreated into the forest.
But at the edge of the clearing, I was happy to see the virgin wall of jungle still rising up on all sides, dark, unfathomable, muttering with animal sounds. Our camp was still but a tiny puncture wound in the great wilderness. As I entered the camp, I greeted Spud, who was in the kitchen area making coffee. He was the logistics manager of this expedition, as Woody and Sully were off on other projects. Major improvements had been made; the sea of sucking mud that almost drowned us last time was now being dealt with by elevated pathways and decking made of wooden pallets topped with heavy rubber matting.
I tried to pitch my tent as far away from the tent city as possible, but as I scouted out an area at the edge of the clearing a polite young soldier on patrol stopped me and ushered me back with gestures. “No, no, señor,” he said. “Serpientes para allá. Snakes over there.”
Disgruntled, I set up my tent in an open spot in the midst of the tent city. I crawled inside, stripped, and smeared myself with 100 percent DEET for the second time that day. I sprayed my clothes and put them back on, the choking stench of bug spray filling the inside of the tent. I then grabbed my notebook and camera and hiked up to the lost city. A good trail had been cleared to it—no need for a machete-wielding escort and no possibility of getting lost. The day was lovely, the sky full of drifting cumulus.
I crossed the river via another single-log bridge and followed the trail. When I came to the steep slope below the pyramid, I found a gang of soldiers cutting a staircase in the earth, which they were shoring up with stakes and logs, for the president’s visit. A nylon rope served as a handrail. As I climbed the stairs and reached the base of the pyramid, the trail narrowed and once again I was back in mostly intact jungle, thankful to see it the same, except for a sign that read, in Spanish, NO SMOKING FROM HERE ON.
The site of the cache was mostly unchanged. Only a minimal amount of clearing had been done, just enough to give Anna, Chris, and the other archaeologists elbow room. Chris had taken the greatest care to keep it as undisturbed as possible.
I greeted Chris and Anna, who were working on a single square meter of ground, which held the artifacts the president would remove the next day. Anna was carefully brushing earth off a spectacular ritual vessel carved with vulture heads. I met the new archaeologists working on the site, both Honduran and North American.
The cache area had been cordoned off with yellow tape and gridded with string into one-meter-square units. In the few days since work had commenced, three of those squares had been opened up. Two were densely packed with breathtaking artifacts. A third square had been cut into the ground off to one side, beyond the cache, to determine the natural stratigraphy of the site—how the layers of earth were laid down without artifacts—as a control.
I was happy to see Dave Yoder, once again festooned with camera equipment, taking photos. He was covering the excavation for National Geographic, and he looked vastly better than the last time I saw him. I asked Dave about his leish. The good news was that, even with only two infusions, his disease had healed quickly and there had been no need for additional treatment. But his recovery from the drug ordeal had been agonizing. “I felt exhausted and tired for months afterward,” he told me. “I’m not sure I’ve really recovered yet, to be honest.”
How did he feel about going back to the jungle? Was he worried about his safety?
“I’m a photographer,” he said with a snort. “I don’t come to places like this to be safe.” And he wasn’t safe: Later in the month on that assignment, Dave had several close calls. One night, on his way to the latrine, he ran into what he described as a “totally pissed-off” four-foot coral snake crawling down a bamboo stalk. It reached the ground and headed straight into camp, even as Dave tried flashing it with his headlamp and stomping on the ground to scare it off. The Honduran soldiers ran a “snake patrol” at night, and they arrived just in time to chop the snake up with a machete. (“I felt bad about it, but it’s the middle of the night, you can’t transport it, what do you do?” He added drily, “At least it saved the lives of countless rodents.”)
Later that month, Dave and Spud, along with several of the archaeologists, were almost killed in a helicopter accident. They were flying out of the valley in the same chopper that had flown me in, an old Bell Huey gunship that had seen action in Vietnam and still had .50-caliber machine-gun door mounts. The door was open, a common practice so Dave could shoot photos unimpeded. But when Dave finished photographing and someone went to slide the door shut, it was sucked clear off the side of the helicopter. On its tumbling fall to the jungle it gouged holes in the fuselage and barely missed the tail rotor and stabilizing fins. If it had nicked either, there would have been eight body bags coming out of T1. Chris had been fanatical about trying to minimize the risk to his team, and he was extremely upset when he heard about the close call. The cause of the accident, I found out later, was that the doors on this kind of Bell Huey have to be shut in a specific way during flight to avoid creating a differential air pressure strong enough to blow a door off its hinges.
While Dave light-painted and photographed the artifacts, one of his assistants filmed the site from above using a drone, which buzzed about the jungle like some giant Cretaceous insect. Chris paced about the site, giving instructions on locking it down to protect it during the president’s visit the next day. The work involved shoring up the edges of the excavation pit with pieces of plywood to reinforce them against trampling feet, as well as stringing police tape in an effort at crowd control. He did not want people walking among the artifacts. Chris had carefully choreographed the visit and had a clipboard with a list of the select few who would be allowed inside the yellow tape for the photo op.
He was not in a good mood. He had not been happy to learn that a curious soldier the previous month had innocently dug up a couple of artifacts, including the famous jaguar head, to see what they looked like underneath. (No looting, however, had taken place, contrary to Sully’s prediction.) A perfectionist obsessed with his work, he did not welcome the potential threat to the integrity of the site even by the president of the country. On top of that, he was worried about his looming deadline. It was now clear to him that it would be impossible to finish excavating, stabilizing, and conserving the artifacts by February 1, when his grant ran out and he had to return to the States to resume teaching. The cache was huge—much bigger than could be seen on the surface.
On a professional level he was also distressed by a lack of support from his university. His participation in the identification and excavation of T1 had garnered significant media attention for Colorado State, with Chris being featured in both the New Yorker and National Geographic and highlighted in the CSU alumni magazine. His work at Angamuco was also well known and respected. For the 2015 expedition the university required Chris to “buy out one of his classes”—that is, he had to come up with the money himself to hire an adjunct to teach his classes while he was away in Honduras, with the other class being taught on an accelerated schedule. Steve Elkins had given the university an eight-thousand-dollar gift out of his own pocket to help make it possible.
During the 2016 excavation, the department required Chris to teach the first two weeks of his classes online—from the jungle—which often meant flying in a helicopter to Catacamas, where there was an Internet connection. The department chair asked him to confine his field research from then on to the summer months, when there are no classes. The summer, however, is the rainy season in Honduras and in Mexico, a period when it is difficult to do archaeological excavation.
Despite these frustrations, the difficulties of being an impecunious and underappreciated archaeologist were, for a long time, more than compensated by the chance to participate in a remarkable, once-in-a-lifetime discovery. From the beginning, Chris had been a driving force of energy and enthusiasm on the team, a devoted professional so eager to explore this untouched landscape that on our first trip into the ruins he had forged ahead, leaving me and Woody in the dust, snakes and jungle dangers be damned. Yet as reckless as he was with his own safety, he was fiercely protective of his team. When the near-miss helicopter accident that threatened his archaeologists was followed by several cases of leish after this second trip to the jungle, Chris concluded it was simply too dangerous to send any more people into T1. “The takeaway from this,” he said, “is very clear—the risk of working at the site is simply too great.” After this second month at the site, he would direct no more archaeology at T1.
As the group worked the site, my gaze drifted toward the earthen pyramid, whose jungled form loomed above the cache site. Three monstrous trees grew in a cluster just above the cache, and beyond that the actual form of the pyramid vanished in a mass of vegetation. I wondered if the pyramid remained the same. Past the worksite, I climbed past the great trees and soon found myself in the emerald twilight of virgin rainforest. I was glad to see it had remained untouched since the year before. At the top of the pyramid I halted, breathing in the fecund smell and trying to connect with the city as it may have been at its apex, before its abrupt and tragic end. The density of vegetation still shut out any hint of the city’s layout or size. Even at the summit I was still buried in shaggy giants that towered a hundred feet or more above my head, draped with tree-killer vines and creepers. I could not see the archaeologists working below, but their voices filtered up through the leaves, distorted and unintelligible, sounding like the murmuring of ghosts.
I focused my attention on the ground at the summit. It was exactly as it had been a year ago when we first climbed up. There was one vague, rectangular depression and other lumps that must have been the remains of a small temple or structure. This would be another place to excavate, to try to understand the ancient rituals of this vanished people, but a part of me hoped it wouldn’t happen, that this spot might never lose its mystery. I wondered what ceremonies had taken place here. The Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures engaged in human sacrifice, presenting the gods with that most sacred and precious nourishment—human blood. The priest would either decapitate the victim or split the breastbone and yank out the still-beating heart, offering it to the sky. These sacrifices were often conducted at the top of a pyramid in view of all. Did the Mosquitia people also conduct such rites? When the city at T1 was swept by epidemics, and the people felt they had been abandoned by their gods, I wondered what ceremonies they might have performed in a desperate effort to restore the cosmic order. Whatever they did, it failed; feeling cursed and rejected by the gods, they left the city, never to return.
With these sobering thoughts in mind, I descended from the hill and made my way back to camp as the setting sun filled the treetops. After dinner, when it got dark and the bugs came out, I forgot my promise to take refuge in my tent and instead lingered in the kitchen area with Chris, Dave, Anna, Spud, and the rest. We relaxed under the tarp, telling stories, listening to music, and drinking tea by the light of a softly hissing Coleman lantern. There is something irresistible about an evening in camp, when the temperature cools and the soft night air is filled with the sounds of wildlife, while everyone kicks back from the work of the day. Over at the soldiers’ camp, a string of Christmas lights lit up and we heard the sounds of an action film echoing from the main tent.
The next morning, I was glad to hear the familiar roar of the howler monkeys at dawn, although they had by now retreated across the river. The morning mist filled the air. The soldiers were back at work, excited and nervous, putting the finishing touches on the staircase for the president’s visit later that morning. Their boots were polished, weapons cleaned and oiled, uniforms as neat as possible in the steamy jungle environment.
The mist broke around midmorning and a brief rain fell in the weak sunlight. Then the sound of helicopters filled the air, distant at first, getting louder. Three landed in quick succession, disgorging press and Honduran officials—and Steve Elkins. The brass included the commanding general of the Honduran army; the minister of defense; Ramón Espinoza, the minister of science and technology; and Virgilio. Out of the third helicopter, emblazoned with Honduran flags, stepped the president of the country, Juan Orlando Hernández, accompanied by the American ambassador, James Nealon.
Chris Fisher greeted President Hernández on the landing pad with an urgent gift: a brand-new pair of snake gaiters to put on before he went any farther. We stood by while the president cheerfully wrapped them around his calves, chatting in English with Steve, Chris, and the ambassador. Dressed in a guayabera shirt and a Panama hat, Hernández was not a tall man; he had a friendly, boyish face, and carried himself without any of the stiffness or pomp one might expect from the country’s leader. Indeed, I had noticed that when people entered the T1 valley, a place so completely cut off from the world, distinctions and hierarchical divisions seemed to fall away. I found myself, for example, rolling up my sleeve and comparing my leishmaniasis scars with those of Lt. Col. Oseguera.
I followed as the president and his entourage began the hike up to the site, toiling up the earthen staircase and piling into the cache area, hemmed in by jungle. Chris’s police tape was soon ignored and everyone crowded into the excavated area, tromping about and posing for photographs. I could see Chris trying to maintain his cool, a nervous smile plastered on his face.
The president was energized. This was more than an official duty. The first object to be removed, the stone vessel with the vulture heads, had been left in situ, on a pedestal of earth—exactly as it had been set in place as an offering five hundred years before. The president knelt next to it, along with Chris Fisher, Steve, Ramón Espinoza, and Virgilio. Steve placed his hand on the jar and said a few words. “It’s been a long twenty-three years for this moment—finally! And it will probably be another two hundred years to find what’s here.” Chris and President Hernández then grasped the lugs on the massive vessel as the cameras flashed, dislodged it from its bed of centuries, and lifted it from the shallow hole.
While the artifacts were being packed for their trip out, I interviewed Hernández, who spoke with enthusiasm about the discovery and what it would mean for Honduras. As a child he had heard legends of Ciudad Blanca and had been moved by the news in 2012, when he was president of the Honduran Congress, that our shot-in-the-dark lidar survey of Mosquitia had turned up not one but two lost cities. “This is an archaeological and historic event,” he said. “This culture is fascinating, but we’ve got a lot to learn, and it’s going to take some time.” He added, proudly, “We are happy to share this knowledge with the world.” I thought about Juan Carlos’s observation that Hondurans lacked a strong national identity and a sense of their own history. Perhaps we all shared a hope that this discovery might change that.
When the artifact was packed and ready, the archaeologists and soldiers carried it down the narrow jungle trail, a person at each corner, mimicking the litter technique used by Howard Carter at King Tut’s tomb. The two artifacts, the jar and the were-jaguar metate, were stored aboard a helicopter.
Though I had anticipated a slightly longer stay, as I watched these activities I was suddenly told my ticket out of the jungle was the third helicopter, departing within the minute. Once again I had to seize my pack and scramble out of T1 in a hurry, with little time to wax sentimental. Soon we were aloft, sweeping above the treetops, heading for Catacamas. It would be my last visit to the valley.
When we arrived at the airstrip, everything was set up for an important national ceremony. A tent was pitched behind the lab, with chairs, loudspeakers, wide-screen televisions, and food. The informality of the jungle vanished in a sea of military officers, dignitaries, ministers, and press. With pomp and fanfare the crates were taken out of the helicopters and carried down the tarmac, parade-style, between lines of Honduran press and distinguished guests. As a flat-panel screen played a stirring video, Chris and an assistant, wearing latex gloves, unpacked the two artifacts and arranged them in museum cases on the stage, specially built to receive them. The were-jaguar metate sat on one side and the vulture jar on the other. When they were fixed in their cases and the glass tops put back on, the audience applauded the artifacts.
Chris gave a short speech, talking about how important it was to preserve the site and the surrounding rainforest and warning about the grave threat of the encroaching clear-cutting. “For the first time,” he told the audience, “we are able to study this culture systematically.”
President Hernández then gave a brief but moving speech, and his words took on an almost religious feeling. “God has blessed us to be alive in this moment so special in the history of Honduras,” he said, adding that everyone assembled there had “great expectations of what this will mean for Honduras and the world.” The discovery of T1, he said, was important beyond the benefit to archaeology. He outlined a vision of what it meant to Hondurans: Not only would it encourage tourism and help train a new generation of Honduran archaeologists; it also spoke to the very identity of the country and its people. Later he would build a special room in the presidential palace to display some of the artifacts.
Honduras is a spectacularly interesting country, whose people have a bifurcating history that goes back to both the Old World and the New. While the Spanish history of Honduras is well known, its pre-Columbian history (beyond Copán) is still an enigma. People need history in order to know themselves, to build a sense of identity and pride, continuity, community, and hope for the future. That is why the legend of the White City runs so deep in the Honduran national psyche: It’s a direct connection to a pre-Columbian past that was rich, complex, and worthy of remembrance. Five hundred years ago, the survivors of the catastrophe at T1 who walked out the city did not just disappear. Most of them lived on, and their descendants are still part of the vibrant mestizo culture of Honduras today.
Hernández closed out his speech with one final, dramatic proclamation. The city in T1 would henceforth be given a real name: La Ciudad del Jaguar, the City of the Jaguar.