Archaeologists uncover lost civilization in Central America
Updated 7:40 pm, Wednesday, March 4, 2015
In 2012, a team from the University of Houston flew a high-tech scanning aircraft over a remote Central American jungle, and detected hints of an immense lost city buried in the forest. The discovery remained unconfirmed, until National Geographic accompanied an expedition to verify the extraordinary findings in person. Now the explorers are back, the photographs are in, and a vast vanished civilization seems to await excavation deep in the jungle of Honduras' La Mosquitia region.
National Geographic reports:
"The expedition confirmed on the ground all the features seen in the lidar images, along with much more. It was indeed an ancient city. Archaeologists, however, no longer believe in the existence of a single "lost city," or Ciudad Blanca, as described in the legends. They believe Mosquitia harbors many such "lost cities," which taken together represent something far more important—a lost civilization."
Lidar (short for Light Detection and Ranging) is a technology developed by NASA and refined by the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston, and it can see through dense jungle to the ground beneath. Center director Ramesh Shrestha was in Honduras when a lidar scanner flew above the rainforest in 2012.
"People in the past spent their career going down and doing this exploration that lidar was able to do in days," he said.
A small piloted plane carried the laser scanner over roughly 77 square miles of La Mosquitia in five days—a swath of jungle that would take a lifetime to explore in detail—and the images it returned were shocking. They showed massive manmade featured hidden in the growth, and a vast valley "almost entirely reshaped by human hands," National Geographic reports.
Ramesh said he was contacted in 2011 by a filmmaker who was searching for the fabled lost cities.
"He was trying to see if there was any way to figure out if there really were the ancient ruins that that part of the world believed--the lost world in Honduras," he said. "Nobody knew where the sites where, nobody even knew there was any indications that there really would be this ancient civilization."
But NCALM and lidar technology changed that, and a NCALM staffer joined scientists, guides, and two National Geographic journalists on the expedition that trekked through jungle to verify the ruins last month. The photographs brought back might confirm the discovery of a legendary city, renowned in local myth that's eluded Western archaeology for a century.
Honduran newspaper La Prensa writes that the nation's indigenous Pech people tell of a royal city called Kao Kamasa, or the "White City," made by lightning and stocked with great white stone carvings, where the gods took refuge after the devastating arrival of Spanish conquerors. But when a wandering man arrived at the city's gates, he was turned away by the residing gods.
So the wanderer called upon the city a plague of pests that forced the people to evacuate the White City and build news homes in the jungle, where they live today.
Other famous tales of the lost city come from 1940s American explorer Theodore Morde, who led expeditions into the Central American jungle. Morde bore a collection of treasures and said he'd seen the city himself, telling of a giant monkey idol, but he withheld the location for fear of looters.
Whether or not the newly witnessed ruined metropolis is the fabled White City of the Monkey God, the find is of staggering importance. Excavation of the suspected various cities will uncover the size and nature of this possibly lost civilization, and could yield revelations about an unknown world hidden beneath the jungle. But, as long as thick foliage envelopes the site, big discoveries will be slow to come.
For now, the lost cities sit surrounded by miles of untouched wilderness, where National Geographic reported many animals seemed never to have seen a human. Cutting away acres of rainforest to reveal the structures beneath requires equipment, which requires roads for transport, and large-scale work on the site seems far off.
Now archaeologists will develop a plan for studying the city burried deep in the forest, and large unknown histories could soon be revealed about a lost people. Ramesh said he was honored to be a part of such a monumental archaelogical discovery.
"It is a pretty gratifying thing to be honest," he said. "I'm not an archaeologist, but I provide the best possible data for the science community, and as long as I can contribute for them to help expand their horizon, it's very humbling, I'm very gratified."
Other great cities of the region are astounding in scale while only partially excavated—some cover dozens of square miles and are thought to one harbor 100,000 inhabitants. The White City could add an entire new chapter to the history of Central American civilization.
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