Slashdot Mirror
Lost City Discovered In Honduran Rain Forest
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.
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?
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.