The Lost Cities (Documentary)

[Music] the search for lost cities has captivated explorers for centuries discoveries have brought riches fame and more importantly links to our forgotten ancestors in Central America many of courted death by venturing into treacherous jungles hoping to be the first to reclaim a lost world our ancient civilizations buried beneath these twisting vines do the spirits of these forgotten people still inhabit that dark recesses of the rainforest what drives us to seek out these desolate remnants of the past [Music] hello I'm Bill Curtis on tonight's program we follow several adventurers who are blazing trails into the last great unexplored regions of the Americas and making some fantastic discoveries first we traveled into the rainforests of Eastern Honduras rumored to hide a fabled white city the gold Laden capital of a mysterious Empire then the story of an isolated village in Belize that kept an extraordinary secret for hundreds of years a Mayan city completely unknown to the outside world will the rediscovery of these lost cities help us understand the people who built them or will their ancient world forever remain unexplained [Music] the Mosquito Coast in eastern Honduras lies on the edge of one of the most unexplored jungles in the world buried deep within it legend say as a long-lost city teeming with priceless gold relics and towering statues of monkey gods the White City or Ciudad Blanca as it's known in Spanish the city is said to be merely a rumor its location a secret as impenetrable as the jungle that surrounds its fabled home adventurers however still search for its location spurred on by the belief that some day the city will be found and with it a small measure of our past they're voyages into perilous territory may someday forced the white city to reveal itself in 1994 a discovery deep within the Honduran wilds offered a clue to its location a team of explorers found a ceremonial burial cave filled with the remains of a lost people the site predated any known civilization in the area and may provide the link to the legendary Ciudad Blanca it focused attention on this eastern part of Honduras where we are on just the very fringes and beyond us there is so much stuff that is unknown that all of a sudden attention was focused on the fact that there is an enormous frontier the first reported sighting of a lost civilization in the Honduran jungle dates back to the 16th century when Spanish explorers arrived in Central America in 1540 for a missionary priest named Chris told Pedraza arrived at the Mosquito Coast hoping to convert the population to Christianity he traveled deep into the jungle for several months until he came across a remote Indian settlement in the mountains he claimed that in the valley below the village he saw an opulent cityscape piercing through the jungle canopy with an enormous white temple at its center the Indians told Pedraza the ruined city was haunted they also said it housed a dazzling treasury of gold so plentiful that the ancient Lords used to eat off solid gold plates but Pedraza never wrote down the location of the mysterious City and it faded into myth these days most historians dismiss Pedraza story as a work of fiction the jungle that he claimed to have explored is among the most inhospitable regions in the world even today no roads exist that much of the area remains of murky dangerous swamp how do you develop in an urban civilization in this context it's very difficult there are no roads because you can't build roads and flat lands that are flooded during nine months of the year yet the legend of the white city refuses to die every year explorers from around the world are drawn to the sleepy frontier town of Palacios on the Mosquito Coast a rugged outpost of under 100 people this is the last place to buy provisions before setting off into the rainforest beyond Palacios the only way to travel into the interior is by water searching for the lost civilization requires canoes and a guide well versed in the perils of the twisting River one of the best-known guides in Palacios is Ricardo Madrid originally a biologist he came here to do research on the plants of the rainforest he was fascinated by the many ruins he saw buried in the jungle rainforest hides at least 80 ruin sites with over 200 standing structures made out of stone these had to be done by our culture who had riches enough to be able to build these structures Madrid eventually met the Pech Indians who live along the rivers of the Mosquitia and who claim to be the descendants of the white city's builders it's believed that the Pech Indians know exactly where the city is but if they tell anyone they think that some great harm will befall them if they were to give it Madrid knew he would have to garner the trust of the Pech he now travels to the remote patch hamlet of las marias several times a year seventy-five miles up the snaking real plátano River the town is rumoured to lie at the gateway of the white city's vast domain traveling to Las Vegas is a nine-hour undertaking that only the most accomplished of boatman dare to attempt the passage is fraught with danger Madrid and his Indian guides must be prepared to face vicious armies of crocodiles another deadly animals right now in the dry season is the worst time for tiger attacked because they are attracted to the animals that go down to the river to drink you have numerous very very deadly snakes one of them is the fer-de-lance they call it the 20 step snake if you're bitten by one of these and you've got basically 20 steps to run before you lapse into death just before dark Madrid finally nears las marias while he now considers the patches friends gathering new information about the white city is not easy the pets are superstitious they have all of their mythology legends and they believe in evil spirits can have curses put on you so you could say it's the curse of the lost city [Music] seventy-five miles up the honduran river of real platinum lies the heart of the largest unexplored jungle in the Western Hemisphere according to myth this lush rainforest hides the lavish capital of an ancient unknown civilization to unearth its whereabouts travelers must face a dangerous river journey they must also gain the trust of the only inhabitants of the area a tribe of Indians known as the Petch [Music] despite some concessions to the modern age the patch way of life has changed little over the centuries many members of the tribe believe they are the descendants of people who built the white city centuries ago Billy childer Francisco Hernandez is one of the most respected men in las marias and an expert on the oral history of the triumph city was the capital of the early patch civilization in its center it had a huge white temple and there they perform sacred dances songs and music many ceremonial rituals in honor of the forest gods other villagers have heard similar tales about the white city from their elders Martine Herrera is father even claimed to have stumbled upon the site many years ago my father and three friends went high into the forest they traveled for two days along a river after a while they saw a tall mountain on top of which saddest strange house with windows at around ten o'clock that night they saw two serpents coming down from the mountain and suddenly remembered the old stories for their ancestors and run away in fear one of the legends that is recited by the patch there are deadly snakes guarding the trail which will attack and kill any explorers wishing to venture there on their own this legend would scare off any villagers from attempting to go and look for the lost white city we have to ask permission from our departed ancestors in order to see it because that is where they had their religion their power a very divine power despite his reverence for the site Francisco has agreed to gun retarder Madrid to its possible entrance way Madrid an explorer from the Honduran coast has been gathering information about the white city for several years the dry season has made the river extremely shallow and no motorized boats can travel beyond las marias the men must rely on the traditional method of travel a Ponte a dugout canoe man by Pech oarsmen who pulled a boat through the grinding rapids after four hours Francisco and Madrid arrive at a bend in the river known to the locals as wild Powell pens sir fee which is patch for ancient stone message there several rock engravings jut out from the rapids the first Boulder depicts a stark face and four swirling shapes upriver there are other inscriptions laid out almost like road signs Francisco has studied similar Mayan and Aztec carvings across Central America and believes he can decipher the obscure messages preserved here these drawings announce to outsiders that you're entering the sacred territory of the white city our ancestors kingdom began here and continued up the river for perhaps another seven or eight days just a little farther upstream is another engraved marker and the final stop for Francisco and Madrid it is the largest boulderettes walpa you append sir P Francisco points out the faint image of a monkey which he says was venerated as a God by the people of the White City our ancestors left this massive carving as a reminder to always protect the monkey they worshiped the monkey above all other animals they watch over our people from the treetops warning us of evil spirits that live in the forest Madrid closely examines the monkey image because it supports his own research about the white City while poring through archives about the region he came across an obscure book written by a u.s. adventurer named Theodore Morde a called the city of the monkey gods in 1939 mordy mounted a five-month expedition cutting through the unchartered unexplored Mosquitia but he had pet Indian guides who were willing to show him where the ruins were with their support more they eventually located a huge ruined city beyond a corbelled archway he later wrote was a long causeway festooned with gigantic animal images on the left there was a carved figure of a tarantula on the right crocodile figure and up the stairs on top there was a huge statue of a monkey with altar before for sacrifice more day died soon after he completed his book and his account was never verified yet his descriptions of the ruins closely mirror Pech legends about the site the pets no longer venerate monkeys or any other animals yet traces of an earlier culture can still be seen in Las Meninas the tribe relies on age-old relics like this simple grounding stone hundreds of much more valuable artifacts are said to still exist within the walls of the White City yet the Pech say they are wary of discussing the site with outsiders yes the white city exists we are sure of it my father has been there and seen many sacred things but we are afraid to reveal its location because people will take these things away destroying the city forever for centuries the great treasures of the white city have remained safe shrouded in the forbidding jungle that envelops the real platinum explorers who would want a venture upriver should be very cautious some of the larger carnivores in the Mosquitia like the Jaguar can come into camp and take you by the head right through your tent and drag you out into the bush and eat you with not much left not a trace yet in recent years several Trailblazers have faced the hazardous trials of the Mosquitia to voyage even further into the region many have long believed the rainforests of the Mosquito Coast in Honduras conceals the ruins of a grand white city teeming with gold yet no part of Central America remains so tantalizingly unexplored while the Mayan sites to the north were discovered and excavated long ago this region said neglected the early explorers had pretty much figured out that the great Maya sites were primarily in Guatemala in Mexico and so from about the 1930s on for almost 40 years there was no new archaeology done in Honduras today several daring explorers are finally venturing into this last great unexamined area of the Americas hoping to prove that a mysterious civilization once thrived here some have emerged with dazzling discoveries in April 1994 two Americans and two Hondurans were searching the twenty mile long tail guaa caves though they had been explored many times before this time one of the men happened to glance up and notice a tiny passageway 30 feet from the floor he scaled the slippery wall and peered inside staring back at him through the gloom where human skulls that seemed to glow American archaeologist and cave expert James Brady was quickly summoned to the site we walked in and the first thing I saw was a very large deposit of human bones all covered in white calcite so that the skulls and the bones jumped out as a sparkling presence in our headlamps carefully arranged next to the bones were offering bowls placed there by an unknown people as brady made his way through the narrow passage he was awed by the tombs size and significance there was so much bone there I I immediately became aware that this was not what I had been prepared to find this was something of extreme importance the skulls were quickly kremen dated to determine their age results were shocking these people died around 2000 BC over a thousand years before most experts thought any civilization had developed here it changed our perspective and not only in Honduras but in Mesoamerica in general as to the development of Mesoamerican civilization we're going to have to rethink the formative and pre-classic period after the discovery of tile Guam archaeologists began scouring the area surrounding the caves convinced the remnants of some great civilization would be found nearby could it be the fabled White City we looked all over for the settlement that correspond to the people in the cave that the people at that time period were using and we never succeeded in locating it since the search however another Explorer claims to have come much closer to finding the light City dereck parent Trek deep into the heart of the Mosquitia and found a site no outsider had ever seen in early 1997 we launched an expedition to try to substantiate claims that there was a lost city pueblo in a mountain region called Cerro Diablo the devil mountain which led us through a small pêche village the villagers here spoke absolutely no Spanish whatsoever only the local language speaking in an archaic form of Pech the villagers told parents guide about several strange events that had recently occurred coming through the jungle at odd times of the day sounds of children playing in the direction of the of our ruin find when in fact no people were actually in that forest another story a villager had actually found a piece of pottery near the site and had used it to cook with and she had taken ill with this very very high fever and had died that very evening the village chief was too afraid to guide parents team to the ruins yet he pointed the way and after a six-hour hike the Explorers made a startling discovery our pêche guide was the first person to actually see what looked like a stairway they climbed to the top and discovered ancient rain battered statues of monkeys the holy icon of the lost people of the Mosquitia but parent did not believe this site was the fabled white city because it didn't fit the description of Theodore Morde a the man who claimed to have found this site in the 1930s according to Theodore Morde a the Ciudad Blanca is supposed to have been constructed of the light-colored stone and is denoted by a large stone archway so I'm still unconvinced that what we had found here was the mythical lost white city but I believe that it may have been a part of the greater legend and connected with the greater city which may still lie undiscovered in the dense jungles of the Mosquitia floors spurred on by this belief parent has since joined a team of explorers who are using satellite technology to examine the area in greater detail satellite images give you a view of the earth that is high resolution and what we get from that are really what I like to call targets these are things on the image that look like they might have something to do with ancient civilization or ancient times I think the group has a good chance of identifying a major fine in the area but again who is to say that what they will find is indeed to Ciudad Blanca the white city is remembered in the annexed or the Pech Indians but is there truly a lost civilization in the jungles of the Mosquitia we know there's a great civilization in eastern Honduras the amazing thing is that an incredible civilization has been lost to our knowledge Ciudad Blanca if it's a real archaeological site will simply give us one more great city of the eastern hunter and civilization about which we know almost nothing there is no doubt that there are big sites out there no doubt about it there is in that respect a civilization a lost civilization is what you want okay it's a lost civilization because we haven't explored it we don't know much about it although the patches cert they are the descendants of the white city experts are wary of accepting their stories as fact because their oral histories are woven into fanciful legends things past are remembered but they are remembered as part of a myth of a repeating cycle of something that happens over and over again so they would have no no no real historical clue to give us the historical clues that archaeologists do have are equally difficult to interpret the rock carvings offer no tangible proof of either who carved them or what they are meant to express it's difficult to know when they were actually created because it can't by definition be associated with any artifacts you can't find little bits of pottery stuck in the rock art archeologists have turned to cutting-edge satellite photography to aid them in their search yet even the most modern technology cannot always uncover the elusive past most of the targets we find are not archaeological sites they turn out to be natural features or they turn out to be modern features these are things that you cannot determine until you actually get there on the ground some archaeological evidence provides hope that the White City may exist the discovery of fatale Goya caves links the lost civilization and the current residents in the region the Pech indians the burial techniques are curiously similar the bones in the cave were first buried elsewhere until all the flesh had fallen off then they were gathered up and carefully placed on ledges deep in the cave a similar ritual was once used by the pinch the pitch indians would expose the dead body until nature had taken care of it now the birds and the Sun and so on and then they would collect the bones and and and buried them for a second time for a decent permanent resting place for the patch themselves there is no need for any high-tech exploration to prove that the white city exists the white city does exist but it is now left in ruins they had a great spiritual tea lost to us all today's pitch don't have the kind of power that our forefathers did but if we want we can reclaim it it is still out there the white city exists if the patch do no the white city's exact location they have kept a fantastic secret some may find it hard to believe that any group could maintain that kind of covert pact but a group of villagers in nearby Belize did safeguard a tremendous lost city for several hundred years for generations our obsession with the past has compelled us to scour the rainforest for evidence of ancient civilizations many believe fantastic lost cities are still out there waiting to be rediscovered for nearly 300 years the quiet village of Crooked Tree protected one such site a completely unknown and unlooted Mayan city the village is in Belize a tiny Central American country on the eastern fringe of the once mighty Mayan Empire a small fishing community Crooked Tree is nestled on a remote jungle island most of its inhabitants are creole of afro-caribbean descent they emigrated here several hundred years ago when the British began logging the area about five miles from the village and a secluded Lagoon a huge mound rises up from the jungle canopy it appears to be a hill to the rare visitor but to the residents of Crooked Tree the mound was the town's greatest secret an ancient ghost town inhabited by Indian spirits Glen Crawford is the son of the village chairman and grew up in Crooked Tree he often heard eerie tales about the place when he was a boy my dad used to always pointed out to missus that's where Indian Hill is as we used to call it and used to always hear lots of stories about the Indians writing in their horses at night you can hear the spirits moving and people ologist you know keep their distance away from it but one day while fishing nearby Glenn's curiosity got the best of him I'm gonna go sure and see what's up with this site you know I was alone and I just had my much a day walking my way in there and I looked up and I saw these huge buildings just standing there not a lot of light hits the forest floor in there and I just felt like my hair stood up on my body I think this is enough so I backed out and I went on fishing Glenn returned to Crooked Tree and said nothing of what he had seen yet he now knew what elders of the village had kept secret for generations Indian Hill was a colossal Mayan city the ancestors of Crooked Tree discovered the site when they settled here in the 18th century although they were not descendants of the Maya they still believed in honoring the people who farmed this land before them and worried that the spirits of the place would be angered if the site was disturbed they decided to make it their collective secret Glenn honored the covert pact of the village but he could not forget what he had seen at Indian Hill he visited several excavated Mayan ruins nearby hoping to get an idea of what the site might have looked like before the jungle swallowed it up at Alton ha a messy ruined 20 miles from Crooked Tree Glen says he experienced a sense of deep kinship to the ancient Maya I feel connected to the Mayas in a way that I like the jungle so much the forest you know when I go up to these sites I try to picture myself being being a part of that culture between 300 and 900 AD when Alton ha was at its peak the Mayan people were building similar cities all across Central America these were sprawling urban centers some over 10 miles long replete with elaborate pyramids statues and temples for reasons that are still debated Mayan society collapsed in the 11th century AD the cities were abandoned and slowly the jungle took over eventually the site will slowly become covered so you have seeds blown in which will later start taking root separating blocks toppling blocks what you end up having is natural art man placed and nature's hand came in and modified it the once powerful cities of the Maya remained at the mercy of the rainforest for almost a thousand years then in the 19th century archaeologists and adventurers began scouring Central America spurred on by dreams of ancient relics eventually the majesty of the Mayan Empire was revealed to the modern world over the ensuing years however most exploration was only being done by destructive flutters rather than preserve the relics they found they hacked them to pieces and sold them off block by block on the black market by the late 1980s such plundering had reached epidemic proportions in Belize the villagers of Crooked Tree were worried that it was only a matter of time before looters stumbled upon Indian Hill in order to save the site however they knew they needed outside help in 1989 Glen met an American anthropologist named Richard Wilk who was doing research on the people of Crooked Tree the two became friends and often went fishing together early one morning they journeyed to a lagoon in nearby Albion Island a few miles away Wilkes wife Maya archaeologist named Ann PI burn happened to be excavating a tiny site I went up there and after we've after we fish for about a couple hours he said you should come back and see see what my wife is doing doing some excavations here on the island Glen was impressed by N's love of the Mayan past and by her ability to work closely with the local population I saw a lot of the people from the village er working with her and they were learning how to Esquivel and they weren't just working they were getting lessons on how to do this stuff and she doesn't do anything before contacting the village chairman and I thought that was very nice back at Crooked Tree glen discussed what he had seen with the village elders they decided to let n pi burn be the first person outside of Crooked Tree to ever see the ruins at Indian Hill and was honored to be asked but she had seen so many badly looted sites in Belize that she initially refused I didn't want to be depressed looting is big business all over the world archaeological sites are being ripped up for stuff to sell as an archaeologist that's painful to me especially because they leave the hole that they've dug open so that the site falls into pieces but Glen remain persistent he visited her several times insisting that the trip would be worth her while at that point was no longer able to resist the invitation to see some mounds finally in November 1989 Annan Glen set off on the one-hour trek to adian Hill coming out through gorgeous flocks of birds was itself delightful of course I was still not expecting there to be any anything of great consequence at the end of the trip the people of Crooked Tree village in Belize have kept an amazing secret for nearly 300 years just five miles outside of town by a lost Mayan city no outsider had ever seen in November 1989 the village elders decided to allow an archaeologist named an pi burn and her husband Richard Wilk to see the site and immediately noticed that compass undisturbed artifacts littered the ground being the archaeologists that I am I had my eyes glued to the ground when my husband stopped very abruptly in the forest in front of me and I literally because I had my head down ran into his back with the top of my head and looked up angrily to find out why he was tripping me to look up 70 feet in the air because there was a very big building in front of me and climbed up the city's central pyramid now festooned with palm trees and several feet of Earth at the top another surprise greeted her we immediately began to find offerings that had been left by my people coming back visiting the site after it was no longer being used as a settlement we find the little faces of incense burners smiling up at us from the leaf litter Jade beads Jaguar teeth that people had placed here in memory of the people who built this place and PI burn had been led to the greatest prize an archaeologist could ever hope for a completely unlooted lost city I suddenly realized that I'm one of the luckiest people in the world the chance to be the first archaeologist in a place like this is incomparable and and the people of Crooked Tree have since entered into a unique alliance working side-by-side to uncover one of the greatest Mayan discoveries of recent times many of the villagers feared what would happen when Indian Hill was asked to forfeit its secrets what would the spirits do now that their sacred ground was being disturbed and shrugged off such fears and decided to spend the season living right on the site a decision much admired in Crooked Tree even a religious wouldn't go up there and live just like that you know we have more superstitious believes then then the American that was probably excavating the city suffocated by jungle growth is no easy task the site is several miles long and is home to many wild animals during their first visit a rare jungle cats called a Jaguar wounde was spotted on top of the pyramid the group decided to rename the city Chow eesh the ancient Mayan word for this animal the team began their excavations by clearing the forest growth of palm leaves some of which were over 40 feet long the work at times was extremely dangerous always keep your eyes down I was just gonna hurrying going through the forest and I almost almost upon a rattlesnake you could have heard my heart so beating ten feet away I was so scared because I knew that you know that would probably been it for me despite the perils of the jungle and in the villagers are slowly uncovering the mysteries of who built cowfish and what the site once looked like we're in the middle of the downtown of the settlement this is where the leader of the community lived I suspect that this platform that saw many market days where people came to buy and sell cloth stone tools pottery goods from far-off places clearly the most impressive structure is the 100 foot high pyramid in the center of the site archeologists have been able to glean a general idea of how it looked when it was just built this pyramid would have probably been painted crimson which is surprising to a lot of people because if we visit reconstructed Maya sites we think of the architecture as being a stark white in reality most monumental my architecture would have been plastered and painted a wide variety of colors in other places the team has found several skeletons carbon dating suggests ciao ich was inhabited for well over 2,500 years including a period long after other Mayan cities had already been abandoned ciao quiche has the potential to tell us an enormous amount about the early development of a Maya Center and its persistence in the classic period and some of the strategies that made it possible to survive unraveling the mystery of how this great city was able to survive the collapse of classic Mayan civilization will take many years the Chao Heche has already become an example of how archeologists and a local population can work together to preserve the traces of our forgotten past crooked trees decision to reveal their lost city to the outside world has altered the lives of the villagers and the archaeologists who were allowed to see this site as commissions are going on no for the past five six years people are getting more relaxed about digging up the graves and stuff so I guess superstition is a it's not as much there as it used to be it makes me feel a pretty large responsibility to the people who brought me to chahiye Sh who trusts me what we do there is in a very important way a collaboration why do so many modern-day adventurers feel compelled to seek out these majestic remnants of the past in human civilization and maybe engrained in the human psyche there is a need to think of this perfect time in perfect society in in the past and so we have this romantic urge to find this place that is maybe not as rotten as our own present society many of the supposedly cities relate to civilizations that collapsed and it would be good to know why they collapsed to make sure that at least we don't repeat the same mistakes they did before we started history before we started archeology we had mythology we were telling ourselves how it came about because we really need those explanations and there is something basically exciting about finding that lost chapter in your own history in their search for lost civilizations today's archaeologists rely more on carbon dating and satellite equipment that on ancient myths but the quest is the same for the high-tech Explorer as it was for the first adventurer who wandered into the Uncharted jungle armed with his wits and a machete human curiosity drives us to become time travelers teasing the truth of our origins out of these desolate ruins [Music] [Music] you

Channel: DocSpot

Views: 509,518

Rating: 4.6402879 out of 5

Keywords: Lost City, Lost Cities, Missing, Unexplained, History, Ancient

Id: u6Yuy3hPZ2Q

Length: 44min 46sec (2686 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 09 2018