After our expedition departed the valley of T1 in February 2015, the ruins lay undisturbed for almost a year. A rotating contingent of Honduran soldiers remained in our old campsite, guarding the city. Within weeks, soldiers began coming down with leishmaniasis, something that the Honduran military had not experienced elsewhere in the country. The military considered pulling them out, but in the end it dealt with the problem by rotating the soldiers frequently in hopes that would minimize exposure. The soldiers cleared the brush and vegetation in the camp area, leaving only the trees, in an effort to reduce the habitat for sand flies. To make the rotations simpler and quicker, the military built a barracks at the Aguacate airstrip.
The excavation of the artifact cache at T1 became a priority. Even Chris understood that leaving everything in the ground was not a long-term option. With archaeological looting a widespread problem in Honduras, and the cache worth millions of dollars, it would have to be guarded indefinitely by the military. That was not realistic, given the expense, the frequent changes in government, and the raging leishmaniasis that made a permanent human presence in the valley problematic.
At the same time he fought his grueling battle with leish, Chris prepared a plan of work and began assembling an expert team of archaeologists and technicians to excavate the cache. The idea wasn’t to remove the entire offering, but only to take out artifacts that were sticking out of the ground and in danger of being disturbed. He planned to leave the rest of the site covered and hidden so the material remaining underground would be safe. He hoped a partial excavation would help us begin to understand the meaning of the cache and any answers it held to the many mysteries surrounding this culture. (Later, Honduran archaeologists continued the excavation and have at the time of writing recovered over five hundred artifacts.)
The academic controversy about the expedition did not die down, as many on the team had hoped it would. Many months after the 2015 expedition, Juan Carlos gave a talk in Tegucigalpa about the expedition’s lidar work, and a group of protestors showed up to heckle. Their leader, Gloria Lara Pinto, a professor at Universidad Pedagógica Nacional Francisco Morazán in Tegucigalpa, arrived late. She stood up during the question-and-answer period and challenged Juan Carlos, saying that he was not an archaeologist and had no business passing himself off as one, and that his talk (which was for a general audience) lacked scientific rigor. Juan Carlos pointed out that he had made precisely those disclaimers at the beginning of his lecture and that it was a shame she had arrived late and missed them. “I acknowledged,” he told me later, “that I was not an archaeologist or an anthropologist, but as a Honduran I do have the right and the obligation to understand more of my country’s geography and history, and as a PhD researcher I do have the basic tools to do historical research.” After his response, he said, the audience booed Professor Pinto and her group of hecklers.
The cost of the return trip and the excavation amounted to almost a million dollars, much of it again due to the expense of operating helicopters. With Chris’s help, Steve Elkins and Bill Benenson worked to raise the funds, receiving contributions from the Honduran government and the National Geographic Society. National Geographic magazine once again hired me to cover the team’s work. I was apprehensive about going back but intensely curious to see what was in the cache. Wisely or not, I was no longer worried about leish: I was, in fact, far more concerned about poisonous snakes and dengue fever. The size, power, and lethality of that first fer-de-lance we encountered had been an experience I would never forget. Instead of reusing my old Kevlar snake gaiters, I went online and bought a $200 pair of snake guards said to be the finest made. The manufacturer had posted a video of the snake guards repelling repeated strikes from a big diamondback rattler. I called and asked if they’d ever tested them against a fer-de-lance, and I was told they had not, nor would they guarantee them against that kind of snake. I bought them anyway.
I also had a plan about dengue: I would spray my clothes with DEET inside and out, strip twice a day and cover myself with DEET, and I would take refuge in my tent at sunset, before the mosquitoes came out, and not emerge until after sunrise.
In early January 2016, Chris Fisher and his team of archaeologists, Honduran and American, arrived at the site, set up a base camp, and flew in their supplies. They were working with the latest high-tech archaeological equipment, including tablet computers reinforced and cased to withstand the rigors of the jungle, state-of-the-art GPS units, and a portable lidar machine operated by Juan Carlos. Remarkably, neither Juan Carlos nor anyone else who had been struck by disease on the original expedition was deterred from coming back, except Oscar Neil, who (for understandable reasons) informed the IHAH that he would not set foot in the jungle again.
Within a week, Fisher and his team were ready to begin work at the cache. Breaking ground in the lost city generated much excitement in the Honduran press, although so far, the location had successfully remained under wraps—a surprise, given how many people now knew about it. President Hernández announced to the country that he, personally, would fly in to the site to remove the first two artifacts and carry them to the new laboratory being built at the Aguacate airstrip. Aside from taking a deep personal interest in the project, the president wanted to put out some good news for the country.