A few members of the NCALM team were more skeptical. “There were some on my staff,” said Shrestha, “who said we cannot do this” because the rainforest is too thick. “‘Without trying it,’ I said, ‘you can’t tell me it’s not doable.’”
Others were troubled that no archaeologists were involved. “Steve Elkins is a film guy,” Michael Sartori, the chief mapping scientist at NCALM, said to me later. “Many times, I told my coworkers that this was a bad idea, that this is not the kind of project we should be doing. This is not the normal mode of supplying quality data to academics in the field of archaeology.”
Elkins first proposed to NCALM that they survey all of Mosquitia with lidar. But when he learned it would cost millions of dollars, he whittled down the search area to about fifty square miles. Mapping that would run to about a quarter million dollars in direct costs and a similar amount in supporting costs.
T1 was only twenty square miles. In case T1 came up empty, Steve chose three other unexplored areas to survey. He called these T2, T3, and T4. T2 was a deep valley surrounded by white limestone cliffs that had also been rumored to contain the White City. T3 was an area like T1—difficult to get to, scientifically unexplored, a gentler landscape with large open areas, locked in by mountains. T4 was the valley where Elkins believed Sam Glassmire had found his ruin.
Elkins did intensive research into the four target areas to see if any recent exploration had been done, archaeological or otherwise. He pulled together the latest maps of all the known archaeological sites in Mosquitia. He combed the archives of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History looking for unpublished reports, and he searched the official Honduran register of archaeological sites.
Over the course of the twentieth century, archaeologists had identified about two hundred archaeological sites in Mosquitia. This is almost nothing when compared to the many hundreds of thousands of sites recorded in the Maya region, or the 163,000 registered archaeological sites in my home state of New Mexico. These two hundred Mosquitia sites ranged from some large settlements with massive earthworks to many smaller sites, cave burials, rock art, and artifact scatters that all appeared to belong to the same widespread culture. Many of these sites, unlike in the Maya area, were simply dots on a map that had never been accurately surveyed, and virtually none had been fully excavated. A century of archaeology in Mosquitia had produced few answers, and much that had been done was limited, superficial, or of poor quality. Archaeologists so far had not been able to answer some of the most basic questions of this culture—who they were, where they came from, how they lived, and what happened to them. Without doubt, Mosquitia harbored many, many undiscovered sites that would yield essential secrets.
Elkins could find absolutely no archival evidence that anyone had ever explored T2, T3, or (aside from Glassmire) T4. With no record of human entry, they were blank, unknown to science. But were they also uninhabited? The archives wouldn’t document indigenous use of the areas for hunting and gathering.
Elkins ordered the latest satellite imagery of the four target areas. When the imagery came in, he had a shock. The most recent satellite photography of T4, the valley containing Glassmire’s White City, showed that it was pockmarked with several recent clear-cuts from illegal deforestation. Deforestation and archaeological looting go hand in hand; Glassmire’s ruin, if it existed, would have been uncovered and quietly looted, its movable artifacts likely dispersed into the black market or hauled off by locals. But Elkins also knew that there were many big ruins in Mosquitia, known and unknown, any one of which might be the legendary White City, if it indeed existed in its described form, which was at the time an open question. Elkins eliminated T4 from the list.
Sadly, T4’s fate was far from unusual. The Honduran rainforests are disappearing at a rate of at least 300,000 acres a year. Between 1990 and 2010, Honduras lost over 37 percent of its rainforest to clear-cutting. All of Elkins’s targets of interest lie within or close to the nominally protected Tawahka Asangni Biosphere and Río Plátano Biosphere Reserves, but protection and law enforcement are weak. The remoteness, the rugged mountains, and the hostility of the jungle are no match for the profits to be gained from logging and cattle grazing. Archaeology is in a race against deforestation; by the time archaeologists can reach a rainforest site to survey it, it may well be gone, fallen prey first to the logger’s ax and then the looter’s shovel.
The permits to lidar the Mosquitia rainforest were granted in October of 2010. They came with the blessing of the president and the minister of the interior and population, áfrico Madrid, along with the full support of the Instituto Hondure?o de Antropología e Historia (IHAH) and its chief, Virgilio Paredes. The new government of Honduras was squarely behind the search.
President “Pepe” Lobo was taking office after a contested election at one of the lowest points in Honduran history. The Honduran economy was the second poorest in the Americas. Large swaths of the countryside, towns, and parts of some large cities had been taken over by narcotraffickers. Gangs had sprouted up and were running brutal extortion and kidnapping rackets. The murder rate, already the highest in the world, was skyrocketing. Corruption was rampant. The judicial system and law enforcement were in collapse. The people were impoverished, adrift, cynical, and restive. The 2009 coup had left the country, including the archaeological community, bitterly fractured. Honduras was a country desperately in need of good news. The discovery of the White City, President Lobo told me later, would be that good news.
CHAPTER 10
I would never go back up that river. That’s the most dangerous place on the planet, that river.
With permits in hand, Elkins went out to raise money. He asked a friend, filmmaker Bill Benenson, to help him find investors for a film project documenting the search. Benenson knew a lot of money people. But after thinking about it for a while, Benenson decided to look for the money in his own pocket. This was too good an opportunity: He would finance the expedition himself. Eventually, Benenson and Elkins divided their filmmaking roles into being codirectors of the documentary film, with Benenson being the sole producer, and Tom Weinberg and Steve credited as coproducers.