The Lost City of the Monkey God, A True Story

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The Lost City of the Monkey God, A True Story; Jungleland Mark Bonta To cite this article: Mark Bonta (2017) The Lost City of the Monkey God, A True Story; Jungleland, The AAG Review of Books, 5:4, 276-280, DOI: 10.1080/2325548X.2017.1366845 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2017.1366845

Published online: 16 Oct 2017.

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Date: 30 October 2017, At: 05:20

The AAG Review OF BOOKS

REVIEW ESSAY The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story. Douglas Preston. New York, NY: Grand Central, 2017. viii and 326 pp., photos, sources and bibliography, index. $28.00 cloth (ISBN 978-1-4555-4000-6).

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Jungleland. Christopher S. Stewart. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2013. xiii and 263 pp., bibliography, maps, notes, photos. $15.99 paper (ISBN 978-0-06–180255-3). Reviewed by Mark Bonta, Division of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Pennsylvania State University, Altoona, PA.

The figure of Indiana Jones, whom Stewart and Preston evoke quite regularly, refuses to return empty-handed to his financial backers in New York. Nevertheless, Indy, there never was a Monkey God, nor a White City for him to rule, and there certainly was never a vast and trackless jungle wilderness in the Honduran Moskitia, untarnished by the hand of man. This does not stop self-styled white explorers, however, like the 1930s Theodore Morde (Stewart’s muse) and twenty-first-century Steve Elkins (Preston’s principal protagonist) from incessantly poking around eastern Honduras until they inevitably stumble on their personal Macchu Pichu in the treacherously muddy bootprints of the parade of prevaricators and looters who have gone before. With pretend pedigrees from misglossed Cortesian communiques (Cortés [1526] 1992) and vague sixteenth-century missionary accounts (Pedraza [1544] 1898) to pad their resumes, they construct “truthy” tales so outlandish that they are able to garner the support of presidents, ambassadors, academics, and in the case of Elkins and company, Harrison Ford himself (vice chair of the board of directors of Conservation International, a group linked to Preston’s account). The 2010s recapitulate the 1930s: publishers, the reading public, the media—all in. Somewhere along the way, though, some dissident academics, who have not unsurprisingly been laboring in obscurity for many decades, raised serious objections about the concordance of their own researches and what, in particular, Douglas Preston and the team he profiles appear to claim to be true. This review is also the story of the fallout from that very public clash, in which I was a nitpicking partisan, having worked and

researched as a cultural geographer and community-based conservationist in eastern Honduras since 1991. One wishes that many-times-debunked tales of monkey gods and lost cities were served up with a heavy dose of irony, or at least a wink. Would that Preston’s book, in particular, were a clever send-up of treasure hunters’ grandiose delusions and the long line of crypto-racist North American accounts—purportedly about Honduras—that are little more than nuanced accounts of North American feelings, with cartoonish cutouts of the locals inserted for color. But no. Neither of these two most recent contributions to the White City popular literature do much more than tell us about white journalists with little to no Spanish language speaking ability rambling around an exaggeratedly hostile landscape populated by a bizarre array of deadly or craven things: actual criminals, possible and potential criminals, looters (one of whom, Bruce Heinicke, is a major figure in the Preston account’s expeditions), “fixers,” “pirates” (Stewart, “Our time with the pirates,” pp. 169–175), snakes, floods, coups, gangs, bandits, narcos, crocodiles, diseases, heat, dogs, trash, and one-dimensional background characters. In the midst of all this savagery, a village lass appears out of the nowhere-jungle with a child in one arm and a chicken in the other, “pretty—slender, with long shiny black hair and a shy smile,” but nevertheless the type of harbinger you come to expect from B-grade Hollywood horror films: “She told us that some ‘loco’ men had gunned down her twenty-one-year-old cousin a few hours earlier . . . with very little evident emotion, as if reciting the weather, she

The AAG Review of Books 5(4) 2017, pp. 276–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2017.1366845. ©2017 by American Association of Geographers. Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.


said we’d see the blood in the path up ahead” (Preston, p. 128). And so the “shithole jungle” mood is set (Stewart, p. 214). There are archaeologists, as well—plenty of these, some of whom I know and respect—but the swashbuckling adventures behind these books are only peripherally about archaeology, which becomes clear when Stewart and Preston quietly bury archaeologists’ professional opinions deep within their accounts. In Preston’s case, one suspects that the admissions that there is no lost city (e.g., p. 111: “I asked [lead archaeologist] 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’”) have been driven by the highly contentious reception of this Discovery/“discovery” in academic circles, given the amount of space he dedicates to the controversy, including replication of our open critical letter that we circulated to the media. Both books belong to the same narrative universe—Preston even endorses Stewart on the cover of Jungleland (“A fascinating and gripping account. A true-to-life Indiana Jones adventure”)—and both writers are very engaging, but whereas Stewart’s haplessly self-deprecating style comes across as genuine, if overly omphaloskeptic, Preston’s much more grandiose account, masquerading as truth, is highly problematic. The principal historical character grounding both accounts, and in whose footsteps Stewart follows, is the 1930s-era con artist cum spy Theodore Morde, who claimed to have found the remains of a lost city built by a vanished civilization. Of all the White City embellishers before and since, King Kong–era Morde (here I thank archeologist John Hoopes for his observation of the concordance between Morde’s tale and the contemporary popularity of the movie) for some reason has found the greatest number of adulatory followers, even though his account falls short long before one considers the surreal “monkey god” claim, which he stitched from whole cloth. Stewart devoured Morde nevertheless, and in a clumsy attempt to discover himself and possibly save his marriage, obstinately set off to retrace the latter’s footsteps, even though the 2009 military coup that deposed President Manuel Zelaya had just occurred. This is an interesting subtext—Stewart seemed somewhat sympathetic to the plight of Zelaya supporters and mildly opposed to the frightening crackdown happening against the Honduran Left when he was there, although he errs in representing the nonviolent “Mel” (Zelaya) as “promising an armed return” (p. 246). Preston, however, leans

far right in his account, which is set during the backto-back Nationalist Party administrations of presidents Lobo and Hernandez, and to whom the various Elkins expeditions he documents were beholden for permission, protection, and publicity. Preston goes so far as to insert the claim that we academics, who criticized the way the T1 archaeological ruins now known as the “Ciudad del Jaguar” were revealed and written about, are not only jealous (pp. 189–190), but are also disgruntled followers of Zelaya (p. 192). For those interested in the role of archaeology in the construction of nationalism, Preston’s densely narrated intimacy with the Honduran power elite is a valuable resource: The impetus of the Nationalists’ support for the Elkins expeditions has been in large part a desired redemption of ultraviolent Honduras’s ghastly international reputation by the discovery of an “unknown” civilization inside a pristine rain forest. It is important, though, to insert some archaeological and ethnohistorical realism into this myth-making, given that the two books have a vastly greater audience than the body of scholarship treating the same subjects. Stewart, if you can read past the stereotyping, is the less problematic of the two authors, in that he accompanied Christopher Begley, an archaeologist whose area of specialty is precisely the culture believed to have created the sites giving rise to the White City/Monkey God legends—and Stewart eventually begrudgingly accepts Begley’s contention that the White City is a concatenation of wishful fables based on willfully or unintentionally misconstrued evidence (“The lost city,” pp. 245–254). Preston, however, is a different story. He savages Begley’s reputation (p. 191), apparently as payback for Begley’s central role in academic critique of an earlier National Geographic piece and accompanying media coverage. Preston sticks fast to the shaky claim that the ruins documented by Elkins’s team (first via satellite in the 1990s, then by Light Detection and Ranging [LiDAR] in 2011, and finally on the ground, beginning in 2015) are bigger and more important than all the other large sites in eastern Honduras. Despite the fact that Preston lists much of the pertinent scholarly literature, he insists on what appear to be Elkins’s main contentions vis-à-vis the ‘T1’ ruins (exact location revealed in Fisher et al. 2016): that the valley (dubbed “Valle de la Fortaleza”) containing them is unknown to both Latino settlers and indigenous Pech, Tawahka, and Miskito; that the valley had not been inhabited or even visited for centuries, not even by the Spanish, who did not penetrate the interior of the Moskitia; that the “civilization” that constructed it is unknown and mysterious; and that the valley’s inhabitants had fled or disappeared, presumably because of the introduction of Old World diseases

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after contact in the early 1500s. All these contentions are wrong except for the effects of disease, which are of course well documented across the Americas. Preston’s most damaging contention, smacking of settler colonialist claims, is that the landscape is empty of people: “[w]e were flying above a primeval Eden, looking for a lost city . . . a jungle that no human beings had entered for perhaps five hundred years” (p. 97). On one hand, it is very true that as a modern settler frontier converting dense, uninhabited forest to cattle pastures and subsistence agriculture moves ever closer to the valley, the pristine cache of more than 500 stone implements is threatened with destruction, and objectively, this artifact cache is the true “great discovery” of the book. On the other hand, although not named on any of the few extant maps of the region, the valley has most likely been visited and perhaps even settled from time to time over the centuries by a range of indigenous and mestizo hunters, gatherers, gold miners, and others, whose traces would have been quickly obliterated, particularly given the frequency of devastating flash floods. In any case, Preston himself describes evidence of recent settlement in the valley: “As we [Preston and others] reached the gap [in the hills downstream of T1], we saw the first evidence of historic human occupation in the valley—a tattered cluster of wild banana trees. . . . This was the only sign we ever saw of post-conquest habitation of the valley” (p. 178). What Preston, echoing Elkins, really means is that the valley and the wider region are empty enough of obvious cultural traces that the lives, motivations, and territories of those who came before, where not set in stone, can be conveniently dismissed. Terra nullius is a quite convenient strategy for Elkins and Preston, I suppose—thence things do not get messy when fabulous caches of artifacts are discovered and prior claimants appear. Significantly, Preston is dismissive of a Miskito claim (as are the Honduran officials that he cites, who received a protest letter), and while he avers that ‘Pech and Tawahka . . . are believed to be the actual descendants of the ancient people of the Mosquitia,’ (pp. 274–275), this serves only to diminish the importance of the Miskito protest, as the ramifications of the other two groups potentially being the descendants of the T1 builders is never really addressed. Perhaps this is why, despite his listing of sources that contradict the team’s argument (e.g., Davidson 1991; Cuddy 2007), Preston insists that Spanish conquistadors and missionaries did not come anywhere near the area—a patent absurdity that is belied by Franciscan missionary accounts of the region stretching from the early 1600s to the early 1800s

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that have been cited and analyzed by many scholars (e.g., Newson 1986). Even before Franciscan missionaries entered the scene, the Spanish had established a tenuous administrative presence across the region centered on the tiny outposts of the Caribbean port of Trujillo and the inland Villa de San Jorge de Olancho and Villa de la Nueva Salamanca, introducing cattle and African slaves, running small ranches and placer gold mining operations, and attempting to control dozens of indigenous tribute towns. Although it is not technically possible, given the types of historiographical minutiae that lead to differences of opinion among the handful of us who have studied the region’s ethnohistory through colonial archival sources, to figure out which Villa de la Nueva Salamanca tribute town was located at the site of T1 (assuming T1 still had inhabitants in the 1540s), this does not make the total lack of acknowledgment of the existence of Nueva Salamanca permissible for an author such as Preston, who telegraphs resentment of critique from skeptical academics at every turn of the page. In any case, channeling Elkins, by ignoring three centuries of documentation and the scholarship, he is able to sidestep the main issue— that the best evidence suggests the Pech, who still inhabit nearby areas today, are the principal descendants of the builders of T1 and many other sites in a region of similar archaeological attributes in the post-Classic, with a ceramics sequence codified decades ago by Paul Healy (see Cuddy 2007), recognized for almost a century as stretching across a wide swath of eastern Honduras from the Bay Islands to the Patuca River, and given various names both in the colonial period and by modern scholars, including Taguzgalpa, Tayaco, and the Paya Region. Thus we come to one of the saddest ironies of the entire White City endeavor—the vast sums of money involved in documenting, protecting, and promoting a single cluster of sites could much better be spent in careful ethnoarchaeological collaboration with the Pech, who are the principal group associated with the mountainous interior of the Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve, where Elkins’s ruins, and many others, are located. The Rio Platano, like all UNESCO biosphere reserves, was set up to safeguard biocultural heritage, and what better way to aid this endeavor—as scientists and as writers with global audiences—than to aid one of the most marginalized and embattled cultures in Central America? What of Elkins’s claim that the T1 site is a “city,” and is larger than all the rest in the region, thus suggesting it was some sort of central place? Preston appears to be hedging his bets in his numerous discussions of this point.

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In hilly territory, LiDAR reveals features not easily distinguishable from natural features in on-the-ground surveys, but at the same time it does not reveal the true size of an inhabited area, given that nonstone constructions 500-plus years old would leave little or no trace in such a humid environment. Thus, thanks to LiDAR, the Ciudad del Jaguar (T1’s official name) area of stone constructions is larger than other sites previously known from the region—but then, those sites were not mapped with LiDAR. It is impossible to know the greatest extent of any of the ruins, however, so also impossible to imagine any type of site hierarchy. As for T1 being a “city,” the moniker is of course highly contextual and relative, and the silly, essentialist debate on the topic is at best a branding issue. Who, after all, would give money to film a documentary or build an exclusive resort around the theme of a lost large village? Stewart, who was on a solely personal quest, is much more informative on the topic, and reproduces verbatim Begley’s admonitions to be wary of grandiose claims and considerate of existing archaeological research (Stewart had nothing to do with the somewhat later T1 cache discovery). My own understanding, in decades of looking askance at the self-serving narratives of purported White City “discoverers,” is that to find the one place that ruled all the rest of the sites, one first needs to believe in the existence of some sort of central place that combines the attributes of Copán, Machu Picchu, and Atlantis (etc.) and that politically, economically, and culturally dominated outlying communities farther down the spatial hierarchy. All contact-period evidence shows that Honduran paramount chiefdoms, or however you wish to label the numerous documented sixteenth-century polities, better fit the model of Clastres’s (1989) “societies against the State,” however, actively resisting the aggressive political advances and supposed social conveniences of aggregation into states and subsumption into kingdoms and empires, whether in pre-1492 American or post-1492 European guise. In the final evaluation, the White City in all its guises fulfills a psychological need in the Western and particularly North American imagination—and among many Hondurans—for something more grandiose than a node in a network of large and fiercely independent villages—it needs to be the capital of a civilization, and the civilization needs a name, and thus are reputations cemented, funders satisfied, and movies made. Any number of other large “White City culture” sites could technically be candidates for this, but they simply will not do, for they are not nestled undiscovered in the virgin heart of the wilderness. This is

why the White City is always sought and only found well ahead of the modern settlement frontier. When the frontier tromps through, the existing exposed and looted sites are found lacking, and thence the city continues to recede deeper into the untrammeled forest. With no more than twenty kilometers remaining between the remotest point in the Mosquitia rainforest and the nearest modern clearcut, in an unfragmented forest block the size of a middling Pennsylvania county with settlement streams converging from all directions, it seems inevitable that the geographic facticity of the White City and its racist monkey gods will disappear altogether over the two or three more decades it will take to transform the rest of the region into a pastoral landscape—unless the Ciudad del Jaguar can cement its reputation as the place. How would geographers benefit from reading either of these books? Monkey God might be of factual interest to an undergraduate audience for its treatment of LiDAR as well as its lengthy detour into leishmaniasis, which afflicted many of the expeditions’ participants; Jungleland, for its faithful reconstruction of the admittedly fascinating Morde’s quest (Stewart alternates chapters between his own saga and that of Morde). Anyone interested in the disconnections and conjunctions of scholars and the popular pseudoscientific imagination will find much of interest if (perhaps obviously) they are understood as vigorous relics of what many of us academics who have been critical from the start perhaps naively thought of as a bygone era. Most instructive, in an era of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and ever-popular “swashbuckling” U.S. geopolitical adventurism, is a perusal of the widespread positive and uncritical press that these books, and particular Preston’s, received in standard media sources (e.g., perform a Google News search of reviews—the results are disheartening). Both books, not least because they are extremely engaging page-turners, would make ideal exhibits for seminars on the role of media in the geographic imagination. Most significantly, this includes the Hollywood milieu, which is closely tied in to all this via the financial backers of the Elkins expeditions. I expect that the issue will stay current, as book deals become documentary deals—and in Honduras, at least, a persistent rumor floats of another Indiana Jones film.

Acknowledgments I would like to recognize the value of the vigorous and relentless critical discussions that scores of us, mostly archaeologists, have had via social media. In particular, I would like to applaud the efforts of Rosemary Joyce, John Hoopes, Christopher Begley, and Eva Martinez to inject

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some realism into media debates on the White City and to support the role of critical scholarly inquiry. In a final bit of irony, I highly recommend the Wikipedia entry for the topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ciudad_ Blanca), shepherded by academics, which provides a solid discussion of the phenomenon, an intimate view of the many contested narratives, and well over 100 citations to literature.


References Clastres, P. 1989. Society against the state: Essays in political anthropology. New York, NY: Zone Books. Cortés, H. [1526] 1992. Cartas de relación [Narrative letters]. Mexico City, Mexico: Editorial Porrúa. Cuddy, T. W. 2007. Political identity and archeology in northeast Honduras. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press. Davidson, W. V. 1991. Geographical perspectives on Spanish-Pech (Paya) Indian relationships, Northeast

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Honduras, sixteenth century. In Columbian consequences. Vol. 3: The Spanish borderlands in PanAmerican perspectives, ed. D. H. Thomas, 205–26. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. de Pedraza, C. [1544] 1898. Onduras e Igueras 1544: Relación de la Provincia de Honduras y Higueras por el Obispo D. Cristobal de Pedraza obispo de Honduras [Honduras and Higueras 1544, Report of the Province of Honduras and Higueras by Bishop D. Cristobal de Pedraza bishop of Honduras], CDIU 11. In Relaciones de Yucatán, 385–434. Madrid: Collection of Unpublished Documents Related to the Discovery, Conquest, and Organization of the Ancient Spanish Overseas Possessions, Yucatan Reports. Fisher, C. T., J. C. Fernández-Diaz, A. S. Cohen, O. N. Cruz, A. M. Gonzáles, S. J. Leisz, F. Pezzutti, R. Shrestha, and W. Carter. 2016. Identifying ancient settlement patterns through LiDAR in the Mosquitia region of Honduras. PloS ONE (11) 8: e0159890. Newson, L. A. 1986. The cost of conquest: Indian decline in Honduras under Spanish Rule. Boulder, CO: Westview.

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