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.

Comments

Re:How did they do it

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

"I'm always amazed that they were able to build a civilization in such a thick jungle."

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.

"Terra preta (black earth), which is distributed over large areas in the Amazon forest, is now widely accepted as a product of indigenous soil management. The development of this fertile soil allowed agriculture and silviculture in the previously hostile environment; meaning that large portions of the Amazon rainforest are probably the result of centuries of human management, rather than naturally occurring as has previously been supposed."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Gawd! Damnit, not Mayans!

[luis_a_espinal]

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).

Re:How did they do it

[MightyMartian]

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.