Lost City Discovered In Honduran Rain Forest 61
jones_supa writes: An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with the discovery of a previously unknown culture's lost city. 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 also discovered a remarkable cache of stone sculptures that had lain untouched since the city was abandoned. The objects were documented but left unexcavated. To protect the site from looters, its location is not being revealed.
"White City" (Score:5, Funny)
White City
Nonsense, its clearly black and blue.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Um, TFA? (Score:1)
In contrast to the nearby Maya, this vanished culture has been scarcely studied and it remains virtually unknown. Archaeologists don't even have a name for it.
I might be going out on a limb here, but let me hazard a guess that you're not an Archaeologist...
Re:Um, TFA? (Score:5, Informative)
But I am an archaeologist and I work in Honduras. The region they're in (and although they're "keeping it a secret" they've previously released satellite photos with the area circled on it so we know what river they're on, and where from the contours of the river course) is not the deep dark jungle. By their own reporting the site is endangered by "nearby deforesting". That means there are people nearby who can get timber out to market. Furthermore, there's previous archaeological work in the same area done by Chris Begley so we already knew that there were large cities along these rivers and that they had ball courts. Nothing they've found is a surprise to archaeologists familiar with the history of investigation in Honduras. They are choosing to ignore that history. Since we don't have precise coordinates we can't be sure, but it would not surprise us to find out the site they visited was one Chris visited and mapped in the 1980s in his dissertation. This region today is occupied by Miskito and Pech speakers, whose ancestors have lived in the region for at least the last 5000 years, and Spanish speakers who have only been in the region since the 19th century.
Re: (Score:2)
It's possible the area was mapped previously or even visited in the 30's by that Morde person, but these Archaeologists are actually examining some of the artifacts, and from what they are saying it appears they don't correspond to any previously known artifacts from other civilizations of the time period. The Lidar mapping done indicated there were a number of cities along the river in this area that were quite sizable. They aren't ignoring the history of previous expeditions at all. The Atlantic articl
Re: (Score:2)
Thank god you're hear to point this out to the people who know the peoples of the region. Why, if it weren't for you, I bet they'd be stuck thinking that they were a completely different people.
They were different people. I'm from the region btw.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
More like Misogynists. Their harassment and human sacrifice of women earned them the wrath of the forest and its creatures, who rose up in unison to overthrow xir oppressors. The trees took the even stones.
Nerd-dom needs to learn from their mistake. Get on the right side of history.
Re: (Score:1)
xir
If you actually knew any cisgendered women, you'd know they abhor the transgendered and pronouns like that.
But whatever. I don't know how cisfemale supremacists have convinced you that they somehow support transgendered identities, but they have.
Re: (Score:2)
You are a crazy person.
Gawd! Damnit, not Mayans! (Score:4, Interesting)
Or someone very closely related to them? You know, the group in that area that formed a thriving civilization that supposedly fell apart during a drought...RIGHT AT THAT TIME?
Those unknown people?
Mayans were only one of the many people living in the area. There were/are Pech in the East (linguistically affiliated with Macro-Chibchan), the powerful Lenca in the north west (also Macro-Chibchan) living where the Mayan once were, Tolupan/Xicaque (language isolate), Pipil (Uto-Aztecan), Ulwa, Tawahka, Mayagna, and Matagalpa (Misumalpan), etc.
That is, Mayan are just the best known culture in Honduras. They weren't even the predominant culture anymore by the time of the Spanish conquest of Honduras. I've been hearing the rumors of the "White City" since the late 80's, and we keep finding archeological stuff in Honduras and Nicaragua which are really hard to categorize as cultures go.
The location of it, in the Mosquitia region, far to the east, is waaaay too far away from the Honduran Mayan homelands. The culture from this site are almost certainty neither Mayan nor Lenca. I doubt they are Tolupan because the proposed Tolupan homeland is to the north of Honduras.
By the geographic location of it, the culture was either Proto-Pech or Misumalpan (or even a culture long gone with no linguistic/ethnic survivors).
Please... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Please... (Score:4, Funny)
"Honey, do you know where we put the city?"
"Pretty sure it's with the keys!"
"It's not with the keys!"
"Did you leave it in the desk drawer?"
"No, it's not there, either! You didn't leave it out in the Honduran jungle again, did you?"
"Try calling it!"
"I can't call it, it's an ancient abandoned city!"
Followed by half an hour of heated argument.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Only half an hour of argument? Newlyweds.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, but its people *vanished*. Like freaking David Copperfield.
They didn't die off or move or even, gosh, "left". *Poof* - probably beamed up to the Mayan God's mothership for slave labor.
How did they do it (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
It was not a thick jungle at the time. Clear cutting, burning, and flattening of terrain was done just as we do today.
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Caterpillar has only been in business since 1925.
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"I'm always amazed that they were able to build a civilization in such a thick jungle."
have you ever heard of Wraith bioelectronics? how about Zerg bio-infestation? what about the orc former ally the undead serving nazul?
a zero-point-module can sustain a sufficently large jungle if it gets one the above applied to it.
Re:How did they do it (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a theory that the jungle only exists today because of the cultivation of plants and leaving of waste by humans in the area previously. They say that the building up of human and livestock waste is what made it so fertile. I have also read that they had a different concept of farming than western civilization. They farmed with many different crops planted together, so that say one that gave back more nitrogen into the soil could fertilize other plants.
It is posited that this is why the jungle is so thick in parts of south america. It was somewhat engineered that way by man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:How did they do it (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure it's true to a point, but considering the fauna that has lived there long before humans came along, I'd say the jungle predates human activity by a very long period of time.
Re: (Score:2)
the building up of human and livestock waste
The Maya and other peoples in this region did not have domesticated livestock, at least as we think of them. They raised domesticated ducks (and apparently chickens brought from China) but other than that their only animals were dogs and pets such as monkeys and parrots. This area is a thousand or more kilometers from the Amazon, which your link refers to.
i'm confused (Score:4, Funny)
is this the city that turns into a ufo?
or the one with the giant rolling stone trap?
Lost in the Honduran Rain Forest? (Score:2)
So THAT'S where I left it! I've been looking everywhere for that city! I checked the couch cushions, my desk at work, transit lost and found... I was just about to give up!
Re: (Score:1)
Good on you. Now answer this question:
Honey? Where are my paaaaaaaaaants?
A rescue team (Score:5, Funny)
Why is everyone so laid back about these archaeologists?
We need to urgently send a rescue team.
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Why is everyone so laid back about these archaeologists? We need to urgently send a rescue team.
I got that! I've been reading about the Oxford comma these days.
its location is not being revealed (Score:5, Insightful)
To protect the site from looters, its location is not being revealed.
Don't forget to scrub those EXIF tags! Otherwise it might end up automatically pegged on Google Maps.
Re: (Score:2)
Or better yet change the GPS data to the coordinates of a prison or army base.
City of the Monkey God (Score:2)
Quick, time to call Guybrush Threepwood, mighty explorer.
Look behind you, a three-headed monkey god!
Lost city in Australia (Score:4, Funny)
If you draw a line from Honduras through the rumored location of Atlantis in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and then through the Congo where the lost city of Zinj is, it points directly to northern Australia, so there has to be another lost city there. Get your machetes out Australians and start looking!
No It's Not (Score:2)
Fuck you, you hater! (Score:2)
That's not a pyramid, it's just a vegetation encrusted natural phenomenon like the "pyramids" in Bosnia.
There's a pyramid under there and Semir Osmanagic will dig it up and prove everyone that it was built by Pleiadians!
Then, entire world will know the Faber College Theme - i.e. our national anthem. [youtube.com]
"City of the Monkey God." (Score:2)
Oooooook!
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Send Giorgio Tsoukalos fast... (Score:2)
New yorker: More indepth (Score:2)
Thought this sounded familiar.
There was an article in 2013 about the LIDAR system they used to find the city and the process of getting the government to agree to allow the mapping.
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... [newyorker.com]
While not as many nice pictures, I think it has more of a background on both the city, the state of the politics in honduras and more historical info.
Location not revealed (Score:2)
Monkey God played by Jeff Probst
Betcha It's Right Here! (Score:2)
https://maps.google.com/maps?q... [google.com]
See the crater-shaped valley? With rivers? And strange semi-circular effects on the jungle?
The buried temple with the huge roller ball will probably be discovered Real Soon Now.
And the giant apes.
A Pyramid? (Score:2)
At least that was the story in D&D Module B4, The Lost City [gobbi.free.fr].
(Sorry, I couldn't resist. Sometimes geekdom gets the best of me.)