The piece touched a nerve. It went viral and garnered eight million views and hundreds of thousands of social media “shares,” becoming the second most popular article National Geographic had ever published online. The story was picked up and became front-page news in Honduras and across Central America. Inevitably, many news outlets reported that the White City had been found.
President Hernández ordered a full-time military unit to the site to guard it against looters who might have figured out its location. Several weeks later, he helicoptered in to see it first-hand. After he came out, he pledged that his government would do “whatever it takes” to protect the valley and the surrounding region. He promised to halt the illegal deforestation that was creeping toward the valley. “We Hondurans,” the president said in his speech, “have the obligation to preserve our culture and ancestral values. We must get to know and learn from the cultures that came before us; these are our ancestral fathers who enriched our nationality. For this reason my government will do whatever it takes to begin the investigation and exploration of this new archaeological discovery.”
Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont who takes a special interest in Honduras, gave a speech on the Senate floor calling for the United States to support Honduran efforts to “secure and preserve” the site of T1.
While this was going on, controversy erupted. Christopher Begley of Transylvania University (the archaeologist in Jungleland) and Rosemary Joyce of Berkeley began circulating a letter criticizing the expedition and inviting their colleagues and students to sign it. The letter alleged that the expedition had made “false claims of discovery” by exaggerating the importance of the site; that it had not acknowledged previous archaeological research in Mosquitia; and that it had disrespected indigenous people by failing to recognize that they already knew of the site. It criticized the stories published in National Geographic and the New Yorker, saying they displayed “rhetorical elements that represent antiquated and offensive, ethnocentric attitudes” that were “at odds with anthropology’s substantial efforts at inclusion and multivocality.” They were concerned about language that felt like a throwback to the bad old colonialist, Indiana Jones days of archaeology.
The letter made some valid points. There are certain phrases associated with the archaeology of the past that the profession has now banished. The sad truth is that, until recently, many archaeologists were shockingly insensitive and arrogant in the way they conducted fieldwork, riding roughshod over the feelings, religious beliefs, and traditions of indigenous people. They dug up burials without permission, sometimes looting the graves of the freshly interred. They put human remains and sensitive grave goods on public display in museums. They hauled off sacred objects to which they had no legal right of ownership. They talked about “prehistoric” Indians as if they had no history until the Europeans arrived. They lectured native people on what their past was and where they came from, dismissing as myths their own origin beliefs. They claimed to have “discovered” sites that were already well known to native people. The ultimate offense was the idea that Europeans “discovered” the New World to begin with, as if the people living here didn’t exist before Europeans saw them. Phrases like “lost cities” and “lost civilization” were uncomfortably associated with the archaeology of the past. While I agree with most of this argument and am delighted that modern archaeological vocabulary is increasingly nuanced and sensitive, it poses a challenge for those of us writing about archaeology for a lay audience, since it is nearly impossible to find work-arounds for common words like “lost” and “civilization” and “discovery” without tying the English language up into knots.
But the letter went far beyond a critique over word usage. The accusation that the team was ignorant of—or worse, deliberately ignoring—previous archaeological research in Mosquitia seriously angered some academics. It was also false. Steve Elkins and his researchers had researched archives in both Honduras and the United States, collecting copies of every published and unpublished paper, report, photograph, map, diary, accession record, and scribbled note they could find regarding Mosquitia going back almost a century. And my 2013 New Yorker piece on the lidar discovery featured Begley and his work, extensively quoted Joyce and other archaeologists, and contained an overview of Mosquitia archaeology. The National Geographic reports on the discovery linked to that article. No one had been ignored.
Begley also claimed that nobody from the team had contacted him, but this, too, was not true. Tom Weinberg had in fact enlisted Begley’s help in the late 1990s—as a string of e-mails and reports prove—but Steve later dropped him from the project. After the successful lidar mission in 2012, Begley sent several e-mails to Steve offering his expertise, writing: “I’d be glad to help on the ground truthing and any other way I can.” Steve declined on the advice of others involved with the project—who asked Steve not to include Begley for reasons touched on below.