Lost City of the Monkey God // Ancient America Documentary

[Music] the Americas too vast continents coated with the ruins of Ages gone by from the sweltering marshes of the Mississippi across the plains of Mexico amidst the rainforests of the Amazon to the highest peaks of the Andes storied and advanced ancient civilizations once called these lands home with roots firmly embedded deep in the mists of time many thousands of years ago with the likes of the pyramid-building Norte Chico of the Peruvian coastline and the mysterious Olmecs of the Mexican lowlands [Music] until the arrival of European disease in the 16th century city building agricultural societies with rich intricate world views held sway philosopher kings of the Maya vast cities of the mashiki Aztecs home to hundreds of thousands and their neighbors locked in bitter eternal war mysterious Nazca of the coastal deserts gold rich metal workers of modern-day Colombia and of course empire-building Inca of the Peruvian mountains but what about the cultures that thrived in areas so remote so untouched that we barely know anything of their existence today the Amazon is one example legends of lost cities in the forest along with endemic domesticated trees and plants suggesting a landscape once entirely molded and managed by human hands now almost entirely gone due to the acidic properties of the forest but this isn't the only pristine rainforest found on the two continents there is another place even more remote and untouched almost entirely unpopulated by humans this is Mosquitia in eastern Honduras 32,000 square miles of rainforest broken up by mountain lagoon rivers and swamps located right on the ecological hotspot of the equator one of the last unexplored places on the planet even in 2020 hundreds of miles of this wilderness remains uninvestigated scientifically a potential treasure trove of previously unknown plants and animals many of the ones that we do know however are not friendly with good reason early European cartographers called this place the gates of hell [Music] barbed plants here can tear flesh from bone the fer-de-lance killer of more people in the Americas than any other snake stalks through the long grass poisonous spiders scorpions and bullet ants swarm on the forest floor even more deadly disease red and sandflies and mosquitoes infest wherever they can and of course this is a perfect habitat for Jaguars one of the world's most powerful apex predators and one with a taste for human flesh even the landscape itself seems hostile to modern people regularly beset by flash floods sodden with pools of quicksand that can swallow a person whole even for veteran jungle explorers coated in protective clothing and hacking away with machetes progress here is agonizingly slow paced but as we shall see it wasn't always this way for centuries stories have been told of a great lost city out in this rainforest often said to be encased in walls of white stone this legend of the Ciudad Blanca the white city is one that many Hondurans here as children often said to be a cursed place sometimes watched over by colossal statues of monkey deities far-fetched this may seem yet like the South American tale of El Dorado a half-remembered nod to the Muisca people of North and South America there is some truth to the tale clearly evident by small statues and carvings brought out of the forest over the years in a subject mired in controversy from time to time locals claim to have visited this lost city as well as all manner of outside expeditions launched over the years to find it but of course it isn't easy to travel in Honduras a place known for many years as the murder capital of the world [Music] since independence from Spain in the early 19th century this small Central American nation has suffered more than most at least 300 rebellions Coos civil wars and outside invasions conspiring to hinder its development at every turn today it remains one of the most economically unequal countries in the world corruption remains rife and conflicts rage between government and gangster warlords in the 1990s when Pablo Escobar's cocaine Empire itself having a higher GDP than most nations on earth collapsed under onslaught by the Colombian military much of the trade lurched north into Central America the Mosquitia region in particular becoming a prime corridor for smugglers every year vast amounts of cocaine are transported directly from here into the United States and cartels rule much of the surrounding countryside and towns gangster warlords with an iron grip though officially under the protection of the Honduran government since being declared a World Heritage Site in the 1980s in reality state control rarely extends deep into this area and illegal deforestation continues at a rapid pace hacking further and further into this lost world its treasures disappearing into the black market and collections of wealthy private buyers the neighboring Maia located mere kilometers away are amongst the most studied cultures of the new world the culture of Mosquitia however remains amongst the very least embodied by the legend of the white city this culture is so little-known it hasn't even been given a formal name [Music] because the region is so perilous the Honduran government rarely issues permits for archaeologists to visit here let alone anyone else nevertheless over the last decade using military-grade laser technology the greatest advance in archaeology since carbon-14 dating astonishing revelations have been made surveys from the sky revealing not just one lost city but an entire city building civilization occupying thousands of miles of Eastern Honduras at the ancient crossroads between Mesoamerica and the powerful chip chant civilizations to the south isolated now once this place was at the center of continent spanning trade routes from north to south this isn't Aztec it isn't Maya it's something else entirely until the last couple of years not one of the sites of this ancient civilization has been comprehensively mapped and next to nothing was known about them until now in 2015 one of their sites on the banks of an unnamed River known simply by its researchers as target 1 was visited for the first time in five hundred years [Music] in 2016 another one known as target 3 was visited to although some traces of the outside can be seen like a potential ball court a cultural import from Mesoamerica and potentially the chip chan language of the people to the south such as the Muisca of modern-day colombia this was otherwise unrelated to these neighboring cultures in architecture culture and society today as cattle ranchers get ever closer and deforestation continues this whole area is still in grave danger of being lost its secrets disappearing onto the black market this is a story that has already spans centuries and it isn't over yet not by a longshot [Music] this video is sponsored by a longtime supporter of the channel and a personal favorite of mine the great courses plus here you can find more than 11000 lectures on practically any subject you can think of in both audio and video format by the leading experts in the world you can access all of it seamlessly on your phone your tablet and your computer this is a university level education at a fraction of the price and one of my go-to sources for information whenever I'm researching a new topic one course amongst many that I enjoyed recently is the history of the ancient world a global perspective by Professor Gregory Aldrete whether you're an expert or a complete beginner these courses are for you you can help me out and get yourself some free knowledge by signing up today to a free trial of the great courses plus by clicking on my link in the description below or by going to the great courses plus com forward slash history time it's 1526 five years have passed since the Spanish conquest of Mexico shattered Empire of the Aztecs left crumbling in their wake and now the architect of that campaign conquistador Hernan Cortes is anchored off the coast of Honduras with the remnants of his army the years hadn't been kind to Cortes and now the grizzled adventurer was facing off against his own man bickering over the spoils of their victory writing to the king of Spain Cortes attempted to redeem his prestige by suggesting an entirely new region to conquer that he'd heard of from the locals not far inland from his anchorage on the Honduran coast I have trustworthy reports a very extensive and rich provinces and of powerful chiefs ruling over them ascertaining that it lies 8 or 10 days march from the town of Trujillo or rather between 50 and 60 leagues so wonderful are the reports about this particular province that even allowing largely for exaggeration it will exceed Mexico enriches and equal it in its largeness of towns and villages the density of its population and the policy of its inhabitants according to Cortez the natives he spoke to called it the old land of the red earth and though ultimately nothing came of the letter it is perhaps the earliest mention of the Mosquitia civilization 20 years later a Spanish priest Cristobal de podracer fated to eventually become the first bishop of Honduras claimed to have traveled deep into the jungles of Mosquitia on one of his missionary journeys accompanied only by native guides but one point along the track he wrote of coming upon a marvelous sight from a high cliff looking down upon a large and prosperous City spread out in a river valley his guides told him the people here ate from plates of gold unlike his predecessors however Pedraza wasn't interested in gold but the hearts and minds of the Native Americans and no further expeditions were made though his report to the king no doubt further added to the stories of untouched cities in the interior for 300 years to come these legends circulated merging with indigenous wants to become something entirely new much of Honduras in the meantime becoming well populated by Spaniards and those with mixed ancestry known as mestizos but not the interior of the East remaining a spacely populated land of indigenous people unwilling to give up their secrets [Music] by the 1830s a civil war tore through Central America the first proper investigation of its archaeology began travel writer John Lloyd Stephens and his illustrator companion Frederick Catherwood traveled south to Guatemala to try and find the ancient cities long spoken of in the forest slipping away from their official government minders to go out on their own accompanied of course by native guides it wasn't long before the two men walked in the footsteps of the Maya locating the once-mighty city of Copan overgrown since the 12 hundreds inhabited now only by monkeys and macaws [Music] the importance of this journey cannot be overstated up until this point ever since their numbers were annihilated by disease in the 1500s Native Americans were generally seen as little more than savages with no real history of their own walking amongst the colossal ruins of the past once home to as many as 25,000 people Stevens and Catherwood sought to change that [Music] nevertheless an enterprising man of his time Stephens bought the site setting about ultimately aborted plans to have the entire city dismantled and brought north to be displayed in the United States this never happened but American fascination with the area and often direct involvement continues to this day uncovering hundreds upon hundreds of similar Maya sites yet copan was in fact at the very edge of Maya territory vast forested mountains to the east proving a very real geographical barrier to further expansion glimpses of an ancient non Maya indigenous people could be seen at the city and in these regions beyond but still little concrete was known how far the Maya domains stretched could still not yet be ascertained and of course stories continued to abound of lost cities still waiting to be found even wealthier than these perhaps Maya perhaps something else entirely by the 20th century the stories had coalesced into a single legend ciudad la Blanca The Legend of the white city [Music] in August 1940 just as America teetered on the verge of joining the new World War 2 disheveled explorers emerged from the rain forests of Eastern Honduras four months earlier funded by a rich American financier they'd disappeared into the depths of the Mosquitia in search of the fabled lost white city said to exist they're embarking on what was then called the third Honduran expedition re-entering the modern world Laden down with a rich collection of artifacts amazingly they claimed to have found it those two men were Theodore Morde and Lawrence C Brown and during the media frenzy that followed Maud gave a radio interview in New York on September 10th one which changed the legend forever I have just returned from the discovery of a lost city we went to the region of Honduras that had never been explored we spend weeks poling tediously up tangled jungle streams when we could go no further we started hacking a path through the jungle just as we were about to give up I saw from the top of a small cliff something that made me stop in my tracks it was the wall of a city the last city of the monkey god I couldn't tell how large the city was but I know it extended far into the jungle and probably thirty thousand people once lived there but that was 2,000 years ago all that was left were those mounds of Earth covering crumbled walls where houses once stood and stone foundations of what may have been majestic temples I remembered an ancient legend told to us by the Indians it said that in the last city a gigantic statue of a monkey was worshipped as a God I saw a great jungle covered mound which when someday we can excavate it a belief may reveal this monkey daddy [Music] maude goes on to describe the innumerable carvings of monkeys he found throughout the region along with native legends of half-man half-ape hybrids living out in the wilderness refusing to reveal the location of the city for fear of looting Mort went on to serve as a spy during the Second World War before in 1954 sunken into alcoholism and a failed marriage never having returned to Honduras he hanged himself the curse of the monkey got claiming another victim perhaps Lord's story remains the most iconic of all expeditions into Mosquitia but it wasn't the first nor the last and as we shall see his City probably never existed at all his recently discovered private journals telling of his real motivations for heading into the forest gold [Music] Theodore Mort only 29 years old at the time with a career as a journalist in the Spanish Civil War under his belt was a conman looking to make his fortune as a gold prospector as the 20th century dawned anthropologists and ethnology began recording for stories and myths long told by the Pech people of northeastern Honduras one of the indigenous peoples who live in the Mosquitia despite repeated attempts and though ravaged by wave after wave of disease during the sixteenth century much of this region then known as Tiger scalper at times said to be a unified chieftain had never truly been conquered by the Spanish and the stories told by its Pech descendants may hold vital clues to its rich archeological past one prevalent legend is of a kaha Kumasi or white house said to lie beyond a remote pass in the mountains of Mosquitia at the headwaters of two rivers often described as a refuge for retreating shamans to flee from the Spanish conquest never to be seen again others hold that the Spaniards did in fact make it to the White City only to be cursed by the devil killed or lost forever the devil no doubt meaning the gods of old the patch having been Christianized by this time others still described the place as a tragic one struck down by a series of catastrophes its inhabitants fearing the anger of the gods abandoning it anyone who entered afterwards ending up cursed dying of sickness or killed by the devil of course like any good story this tale grew in the telling with Americans like Mort adding their own embellishments to it a variety of explorers entrepreneurs and even aviators like Charles Lindbergh began to tell tales of seeing buildings and settlements of stone out in the forest ruined cities in the Mosquitia [Music] eventually all of these disparate tales and stories converged to become one standardized account of the white City and by mord's time the lost city of the monkey god [Music] the first known Westerner to explore the Mosquitia was Luxembourgian ethnologist Eduardo Khan's Emmaus moving deep up the plátano River by canoe traditional way people moved around this wild land Kanzi meais headed to the place where rivers have no name on the trail of the white city of stone said to have been discovered by a local rubber planter some 25 years earlier the man was said to have died soon afterwards according to his somewhat apprehensive native guides killed by the devil for daring to look upon the place quite understandably the people living on the edge of the wilderness remained reluctant to show can see meais around ultimately he left disappointed by 1933 Honduras often they're known as the Banana Republic had been infiltrated by American big business for decades a cash cow being milked of all it's worth enter William Duncan strong the first known American to enter the Mosquitia thankfully not a tycoon but a meticulous scholar the first to extensively study and record what he found in the region [Music] very much in the tradition of the great 19th century scientist explorers without any modern bug spray or malarial medicine as he headed inland along the Rio Pachuca strong kept meticulously recorded journals packed with illustrations of the animals artifacts and landscapes he found over the next five months strong a keen scholar of history established definitively that the area had indeed been inhabited by an advanced ancient culture seeming related to but not Maya he didn't only find sculptures but entire settlements which he carefully recorded as much as he could we know them today as the Floresta mounts the city of Juan kabylia las cruces ostian air and duska brada unfortunately all remain extremely remote and inaccessible today and information on them difficult to come by [Music] strong came up with several important conclusions from his travels the Maya had built with stone this people had not instead raising vast mounds and great earth and works the details of which have long since rotted away but why would they work with stone when they had access to such great building wood in the area it's the same all over the world Strong's discoveries raised more questions than answers if these people hadn't built with stone where had the stories of white walls come from naturally his scholarship was largely ignored and stories of the white city continued to circulate meanwhile in the US another American financier George Gustav Heye eventual stockpile of probably the largest collection of Native American artifacts anywhere in the world became so obsessed with the legend that he began putting preparations together to finance an expedition of his own co-funded by the British Museum in London and led by one of its associates frederick mitchell-hedges the expedition soon set off though soon enough hay began to regret his choice of expedition leader as mitchell-hedges merely skirted around the edge of Mosquitia focusing instead on the bay islands of the Pacific coast claiming them to be remnants of the lost city of Atlantis before contracting dysentery and returning home though he came out of the region with thousands of artifacts and the story of a lost city home to a gigantic buried monkey statue a story later expanded on by Mort mitchell-hedges also claimed to have found a crystal skull in the previous decade later conclusively proved to be a forgery he bought at auction like Mort another spinner of yarns mitchell-hedges was a conman whilst true that in many native Honduran cultures the monkey is a central figure in the creation of the world some groups even telling stories of monkey gods and half-human half-ape hybrids who terrorized their ancestors the Buried statue of the Monkey God may well have been invented by mitchell-hedges [Music] quite understandably bypassing mitchell-hedges for the next journey Hey still captivated by Mosquitia found a new man for the job [Music] enter captain Stuart Murray a no-nonsense professional who conducted two more missions grandly and incorrectly known as the first and second on Joran expeditions Murray found hundreds more artifacts on his travels notably including a stone with what he saw as a form of hieroglyphics on it as well as a small statue of an animal he interpreted as a monkey covering its face with paws within weeks the native who found this was killed by a fer-de-lance ultimately frustrated by his efforts having spent years coming in his view agonizingly close to the city he sought Murray moved on to other projects but not before recommending a replacement to his employer Theodore Mort inspired by more detail of the monkey-god City several more expeditions followed notably in 1960 when a geologist named Sam glass Meier claims to have come across another city in the forest photographing a vast cache of objects he had to leave behind it was also in the 1960s that scientists at NASA started to use laser beams in a similar way to how radar and sonar were already used creating 3d images of everything scanned using this technology called lidar first the moon's surface and later Mars were mapped this was still extremely expensive technology but within decades it would create a revolution in archaeology the most significant since carbon-14 dating enter Steve Elkins a filmmaker Explorer and the man to find the city in modern times in 1994 Elkins had made his first expedition into the Mosquitia whilst making a pilot for a new TV show on exploration rowing deep into the jungle up alligator infested waters Elkins and his team found scatterings of sculpture pottery and tools but no cities what they did find was a carving of a flowery headdress barring man planting seeds far away from any agriculture practiced today the image amazed Elkins who remained determined to return [Music] meanwhile but around the same time lidar technology finally began to filter down into archaeological application [Music] pioneering flights over unexplored parts of the world paring deep into jungle canopies 15 feet below desert sands and even below modern tracks and roads to the ancient trails beneath in this way ancient Silk Roads were tracked across Eurasia a lost pre-islamic city discovered in the Arabian desert and most relevant of all for Mosquitia previously unknown Cambodian temples were found deep in the forests of Southeast Asia by 2010 the first lidar surveys were carried out on a Maya site uncovering amazing details at the city of caracal I just made a video looking at some of the even newer revelations in the Yucatan go check it out here and consider subscribing to that channel to see me visiting and musing over historical sites from all over the world [Music] finally by 2013 Elkins got his hands on a lidar machine after initial aerial surveys into the region for potential sites were pinpointed for a ground expedition to be flown in by helicopter with support from the Honduran government upon closer inspection one of these sites target for perhaps the city found by glass meyer in 1960 but by now already been surrounded by deforestation its artifacts almost certainly looted already disappearing onto the black market target two in a deep valley surrounded by white cliffs was more difficult to access though it could well have been a city it's just as easily could have been natural rock formations maybe even the one seen by Charles Lindbergh in the 1920s at targets 1 and 3 however clear mounds and structures could be seen jutting out from the rainforest floor not one but two untouched cities in the jungle [Music] finally touching down at target one in February 2015 and target 3 in January 2016 two uninhabited lost valleys surrounded by steep mountain ranges the researchers were amazed by what they found [Music] ceremonial architecture giant earthworks mounds pyramids and vast open plazas and [Music] tantalizingly possible evidence of cacao trees and bananas the hallmarks of pre-columbian and post Colombian habitation both trees originating elsewhere the data learned from these sites and others in the region are finally allowing us to come up with a history of this lost civilization one of the last in the world there isn't a huge amount to go on but with what we have we can try and tell the story of this people nonetheless [Music] in the year 426 strangers were seen in the forests of modern-day Western Honduras spear throwers from the north advancing on a small trading town of copán nestled in foothills at the very southern edge of the Maya domain for hundreds of years the cities of the Maya had already thrived the great Lords engaging with each other only to acquire sacrificial victims prestige and trade rights as these Grizzles newcomers came sweeping through the forests towards the city on that day however times had changed a new style of combat a real war fought entirely for conquest having taken hold the aim now being to seize the enemy cities portal to the other world its ruling lords sacrificed to the gods the leader of that war band survives not only in the written record emblazoned on to the architecture of the city but in archeology to his tomb having been excavated in the 1990s his name roughly translated means son I'd resplendent Quetzal macaw and though analysis of his bones suggests a life spent at Tikal the most powerful Maya city of all located not far to the north with significant and brutal injuries found on his body likely sustained on the ball court his dress and the spear throwing atlatl x' of his warriors suggests origins much further to the north on the high plains of the Mexican highlands and the city of Teotihuacan home to as many as 200,000 people metropolis of the new world weather quetzel macaw was indeed descended from one of those teotihuacános who'd conquered Tikal a generation earlier the ripples of its civilization felt for thousands of miles around or an expert ballplayer who'd written to lead an army on behalf of the Teotihuacan aligned lords of Tikal we simply don't know nor do we know whether the original laws of the region resisted him on the battlefield but soon enough the rich trade in Jade and quetzel feathers came under his control and by extension that of the Lords of Tikal and quetzel macaw became ko pans first holy Lord establishing a dynasty of sixteen rulers who would continue to elevate their city into a marvelous and glorious powerhouse rival to any of the older more prestigious cities to the north dominating the entire region for centuries to come over the coming centuries copan achieved remarkable heights in art architecture mathematics astronomy and writing this was a frontier society often the most vibrant and rich as different ideas and styles coalesce archaeology suggests that in the years after the conquest the city of Copan may have been a multi-ethnic one no city-state grows great without some kind of accommodation between ethnic groups the great city of Teotihuacan had specific districts for Maya Zapotec and other visitors and copan may well have had districts for the original chip chan speaking inhabitants of the Copan Valley perhaps related to those of the Mosquitia macaw married a local princess likely the daughter of a local Lord thus securing his legitimacy and forming an alliance with local elites just as military usurpers all over the world have always done many experts think this was at least at first a hybrid society some neighborhoods being decorated with animal heads not too dissimilar to those found in Mosquitia yet direct Maya rule would end here never going further east yet it's hard to imagine that the influence of this great city never extended any further just as the tendrils of Teotihuacan came this far south the culture of the Maya surely must have had an impact on the Mosquitia probably vigorous trade and occasional Wars being fought between them but who were those people themselves in 1994 just outside the town of quatre Camus in eastern Honduras on the Talco River a popular picnic spot for locals a cave was stumbled upon in a limestone cleft a hundred feet above the valley waterfall lazily tumbling down towards the river below one of the most important archaeological finds in the whole of Honduran history was made the cave mouths ear was merely a gateway into a much larger network of winding pathways and gloomy caverns and deep within hundreds and hundreds of human remains a great ossuary of Honduras is prehistoric people usually the climate and acidic properties of the soil in this part of the world conspires to completely destroy human remains which is why few if any prehistoric bones have ever been found in Mosquitia but here unique properties of this cave caused many of the bones and skulls to crystallize preserving them to be seen today [Music] astonishingly the earliest remains here date to around 1000 BC and the place utilized for a period of another 1000 years this is one of the earliest grave sites found anywhere in the Americas and the oldest in Honduras and it isn't just bones found here at the cave of the glowing skulls but artifacts - perhaps offerings to the ancestors or deities [Music] including pottery and precious goods obsidian knives marble vessels and Jade necklaces themselves originating considerable distances away suggesting access to far-reaching trade networks [Music] the cave itself is seen as sacred in the Mesoamerican world view like mountains in the old world being a place with a lines blur between living and dead in the right circumstances allowing access between them therefore at this point in time at least a similar worldview to the rest of Mesoamerica can be seen perhaps the people interred here were ancestors of the Mosquitia civilization perhaps not but it is many hundreds of years until identifiable settlements begin to appear in the Mosquitia region modest structures beginning to be identifiable in the archaeological record from around 480 just as copan begins to rise in the West today the indigenous people of Eastern Honduras tend to speak a dialect of the chip chan family of languages suggesting links to the south as well as the north Mosquitia is right on the edge of the chip chan speaking zone prevalent from here all the way down to Colombia the most well-known example being the Muisca a city building civilization famous for its gold work its king being the basis for the legend of El Dorado thus the original inhabitants of the Mosquitia may have originated or at least been influenced from the south yet this seems to change with the rise of copán coinciding with the beginning of archaeologically verifiable settlements in the area by 800 AD copan was a vast City home to 25,000 people yet the countryside around it almost all the way to the far sea in the North could by now been bereft of its trees hacked down to make the white ash needed to coat monuments this was now a landscape of farms towns and cities linked up by elaborate roads and highways [Music] when severe droughts beset the Yucatan in the eighth century an area poor in freshwater at the best of times increasingly parasitic nobility and commoners alike suffered from malnutrition within a generation all building projects halted and by 822 the very last inscription is found at copán by 850 the Royal Palace burned and by 1250 the valley was uninhabited wilderness once more but what happened to the 25 thousand people of this city surely they didn't all staff and compared to the wasteland of mass hunger and war on their doorstep the forests to the east might have seemed hospitable in comparison perhaps an owl stood group of copán warriors marched over and took over the area by force bringing their culture with them before merging with the local one maybe a more peaceful exodus took place with individuals going east towards their linguistic types or potential trading partners [Music] or maybe the elites of the region simply cemented their own power by Mayan izing themselves citing links to the old trading partners now collapsed we simply don't know but with the collapse of Copan Mosquitia flowered into a new age a flurry of construction between around 800 and 1250 over the course of the 20th century archeologists have uncovered around 200 archaeological sites in the Mosquitia almost nothing compared to the likes of the Maya and the Inca which have hundreds of thousands of individual ruins yet nonetheless these range from large settlements with vast earthworks to many smaller sites rock art cave burials and clusters of artifacts many have never been surveyed and almost none investigated archaeologically like William Duncan strong before them for decades archaeologists like Chris Begley have been discovering sites with help from the local patch people documenting hundreds of them many of these cities were never truly lost just hidden though nevertheless because they weren't lost coupled with the rampant poverty in Honduras many have been looted their secrets lost forever archeology remains secretive here and with good reason even target 1 and target 3 remote as they are remain at risk from looting there are probably thousands of sites in the jungle testament to a flurry of activity between 800 and 1250 but 1000 large cities looking vaguely Maya in structure were built with plazas elevated platforms earthworks geometric mounds earthen pyramids and probably ball courts the most characteristic feature of these cities is the unique rectangular earthen mounds found here around a hundred feet long and thirty wide further south into chip Chan territory mounds become circular and west to the Maya they become square and made of stone this was a place between cultures for the most part these people did not build from stone why would they when they had search amazing wood available to them such as rosewood mahogany seda and gum fragments of stone architecture does survive in places though generally these are boulders from rivers and bear little resemblance to what they would have looked like in their glory temples pyramids and public buildings likely constructed of river cobbles Adobe wattle and daub long since having eroded away like so many other wooden structures throughout history forever lost to oblivion in the acidic rainforest here no organic remains survived not even the bones of the Dead almost everything of these people is gone in their heyday temples here made of highly polished hardwoods decorated by plastered walls draped with colorful textiles resplendent with carvings and motifs could have been just as magnificent as any built by the Maya and like the Maya paved walkways atop the forest floor have been found within settlements perhaps once upon a time even stretching out into the countryside to link up cities as far as what lies beneath the mounts the vast majority remain a mystery do they hide hidden tubes or some other purpose we know that the Maya and other Mesoamerican people made artificial caves in their temples and maybe the Mosquitia started to do this too though they continued to use caves a ceremonial places with caches of objects being found at remote sites today the Mosquitia is one of the most inhospitable disease-ridden jungles in the world yet we know that in pre-columbian times city building kingdoms thrived here and in other remote forests of the Americas for thousands of years human ingenuity is boundless but how was this actually achieved very little is known about how the Mosquitia people farmed their environment though at newly discovered sites like T 1 and T 3 in areas not home to humans in hundreds of years and at other sites discovered decades ago like las cruces once speculated to have been moored city real insights can be made at all of these sites sharp mounds plazas and earthworks are found lining both sides of river valleys in their heyday these may have looked like huge gardens with plots of maize beans squash and chili peppers interspersed by public spaces for games and ceremonies perhaps along with more valuable medicinal crops fruit cacao and flowers for ceremonies much of these crops may have been placed on raised artificial leveled earthen platforms in order to avoid flooding connected by pathways at tea one in particular evidence has been found for possible irrigation canals and even a reservoir similar to the natural cenotes of the Yucatan expanded upon by the Maya it could have made farming possible in the dry season from January to April [Music] the raised embankments at both t1 and t3 could have also functioned a little like a castle being a good defensible position in times of war from either the coast or from the post-classical mire to the west but what was the relation here to the Maya ball courts aren't the only cultural export as possible evidence of a form of cacao tree has been found at t1 a sacred plant and sometimes currency to the Maya known as the food of the gods and perhaps to these people to a foodstuff only reserved for the elite and warriors of the Maya world but first glance city layouts seem similar to with t3 for example covering the same space as many Mayan cities a center sprawling for 2 miles around however the cities of Mosquitia are in fact for the most part much more spread out than Mayan sites which focused on a central focal point perhaps suggesting less of a central political authority t1 in fact maybe a collection of settlements rather than a single City although the distinction may well be irrelevant lidar shows 19 major sites strung along the valley all close together perhaps all part of the same polity or individual villages with their own governance [Music] one of the most common items found in the Mosquitia must be the metate thought to be grinding stones sometimes with ritual significance also found in the chip Qian culture to the south having no metal tools to chisel with these items were sculpted using a difficult extremely lengthy process using handheld rocks and sand and it isn't just Matar taste that people were making found all over Eastern Honduras in the form of small caches of broken objects today finds like these more often than not now in the collections of private individuals due to the painstaking and time-consuming efforts involved in making them they could only have been crafted by a specialized class of master artisans when all of the looted and collected examples found at cities and caves all over Mosquitia over the centuries are taken into consideration this must have been a very prevalent culture still very little archeology has been done and it's almost unheard of to find these cached items in their original settings until now [Music] in February 2015 humans set foot in the deepest recesses of the Mosquitia rainforest for the first time in centuries greeted by howler monkeys with no fear of people the research team put together by Steve Elkins began exploring the lost pre-columbian city known only as target one [Music] for a week they explored this pristine environment so hemmed in by vegetation that the outline of buildings and plazas remained difficult to comprehend even from the top of a nearby pyramid or mount the landscape was still hidden all over the trees having grown tall since this place died then amongst weeds and fine at the base of a colossal pyramid overlooking a central plaza the first truly remarkable discovery was made dozens of carved stone sculptures peering out from the muddy forest floor almost entirely buried by the passing of time a vast display of hoarded wealth had been left here untouched for hundreds of years [Music] similar but much smaller caches of objects had been found before and the objects themselves turn up from time to time having already been looted from sites crucially few if any had been found in their original context and excavated professionally by archaeologists this was far from a disorganized heap everything carefully laid out in its place almost certainly as an offering to the gods taking so many wealth items out of circulation must have been a powerful ritual display not too dissimilar to the material sacrifices made by ancient peoples in Europe such as the Celts when the cache was finally excavated fully more than 500 individual items were found the wealth of an entire settlement something momentous must have been happening to warrant such a sacrifice one of the most interesting of the carvings found bears a resemblance to a monkey at first glance but has also been interpreted as a where Jaguar perhaps representing a shape-shifting shaman in mid trance not too dissimilar to the much older Olmec culture in Mesoamerica Jaguars monkeys vultures and snakes are all traditionally seen as animals of great power and it seems that this place was no exception it's even been suggested that this figure is wearing a helmet also seen on the famous Olmec carved heads a staple of the Mesoamerican ballgame which may well have been played here [Music] a number of ritual stone vessels were also found decorated with vultures and snakes some showed bizarre humanoid figures open-mouthed with hollow ice perched on a small naked body the ancestors perhaps or just maybe tied up captives ready for sacrifice though we don't know whether these people practiced human sacrifice the most numerous objects however were grinding stones or Matar Tait's found all over Mesoamerica looking a little like Thrones or tables these were used for preparing corn a central facet of life here yet these examples are much too large and awkward for grinding maybe they were purely ritualistic or had a different use altogether carrying the dead to their final resting place or even grinding up the bones of enemies defeated in battle [Music] it's all pure speculation at this point but analysis shows the bear craft of at least five different types of stone from different geographical areas suggesting widespread trade links unfortunately carbon dating couldn't be carried out on the cash Burt based on the style the objects likely date from around 1000 to 1500 AD this wasn't an accumulation of objects over centuries they'd been deposited at the same time on a floor of smoothed out red clay like soil called laterite which coats the floor underneath much of the valley a curious throwback to Cortez and the old land of the red earth most of the items here were broken deliberately smashed to take them out of circulation out of the world like at the cave of the glowing skulls and other ancient cultures all over the world so they could journey with the deceased to the afterworld it's the foreboding vulture carving at the very center of the cache that may well be the clue to what happened here vultures often being seen as guardians of the afterlife perhaps this stone represents a shaman who took the vulture as his spirit animal in trying times the last act of a dying city for though this city may well have met its end before Europeans ever arrived in the Americas the most likely conclusion is that European germs proved the final death knell if not the first even if the Spanish themselves never came here their diseases certainly did for in 1502 Christopher Columbus's fourth voyage to the Americas arrived on the coast of Honduras just to the north of the Mosquitia bringing guns horses and diseased animal born wants that Native Americans had no immunity - there were no pack animals in Mesoamerica leading to an extremely one-sided exchange of microorganisms exploring the bay islands not far from the rio Pachuca and rio plata no the two main rivers of Mosquitia columbus described a large trading canoe eight feet wide and 60 feet long manned by 25 rowers with a house in the middle heaped with exotic trade goods from lands far away evidence of a trade network spanning the entire coast potentially all the way from here to the Mississippi mound builders of the North including all the disparate cultures between continuing his journey Columbus found trading ports and towns wherever he went of course he couldn't have known it at the time but the damage was already done long-lasting exchange networks becoming arteries of doom [Music] at first influenza typhus and dysentery ran wild followed every few years by wave after wave of increasingly deadlier diseases crashing against already devastated populations measles mumps yellow fever malaria chickenpox typhoid plague diphtheria whooping cough TB and worst of all smallpox for entire civilizations with no immunity to this disease death rates can be as high as 90% arriving in Hispaniola by 1519 ultimately proving the final nail in the coffin of the Aztec empire this disease likely came up the waterways into the Mosquitia putting an end to settled life here by the time armies of slave traders began ravaging the Honduran coast by the 1530s city life here that likely already died thousands of years of history and unique environmental adaptation coming to an abrupt end the cache of objects found here may have been a grave for an entire city the last desperate act of a shattered world we still know very little about the people who once called these forests home but hopefully with lidar and increasingly sophisticated archaeological techniques at least a little of their story can be salvaged from oblivion the city has a name now this isn't a white city or a lost city of the monkey god but la ciudad de Jaguar the city of the Jaguar archeology students go and study this culture immediately as always I've been Pete Kelly don't forget to Like and subscribe if you made it this far let me know what you think in the comments and go and check out my new history channel where I've just uploaded a video on the Maya thanks for watching and I'll see you on the next one [Music]

Channel: History Time

Views: 1,428,875

Rating: 4.7484813 out of 5

Keywords: monkey god, honduras, Maya, mayans, ancient america, america before, lost civilization, explorers, explore, city, ancient city, ancient people, aztecs, precolombian

Id: FLIjqSHW2SI

Length: 74min 17sec (4457 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 19 2020