As was perhaps to be expected, the flurry of news stories about the excavation revived the academic quarrel and also inflamed a segment of Honduras’s indigenous community. The project’s critics once again took to the blogs and complained to the press. The former head of the IHAH, Dario Euraque, told the website Vice.com that the archaeologists were taking credit for a discovery that was “not theirs” and that they had offended indigenous groups by engaging in “racist dialogue.” He said that the publicity had left the ruins open to looting and that he was very sad to see Honduras turned “into a reality show.” Some archaeologists and others accused President Hernández of exploiting the find to distract public attention from corruption, human rights abuses, and the murder of environmental activists. They condemned the expedition for cooperating with such a government.*
On January 13, a group of indigenous Honduran leaders, los hijos de la Muskitia or the Children of Mosquitia, wrote an open letter criticizing the government and claiming the excavation of T1 violated Indian treaties. The communiqué had a long list of demands, and it objected to the use of the term “Monkey God,” which the writers considered “denigrating, discriminatory, and racist.” The letter concluded, “We, the sons of the Indigenous Miskitu Community… demand the immediate return of all artifacts looted from our sacred site called the White City.” The letter included a map of Miskito territory that seemed to swallow the traditional lands of other indigenous Indian communities, such as the Pech and Tawahka, who are believed to be the actual descendants of the ancient people of Mosquitia. The issue of indigenous rights in Honduras is not simple; Honduras is a robust mestizo society in which most citizens, rich and poor, have a large proportion of Indian ancestry. The Miskito people are themselves of mixed Indian, African, Spanish, and English ancestry with roots not in the interior mountains where T1 is located, but along the coast.
When I asked Virgilio about the letter, he said the government was well aware of it, had long been expecting it, and would handle it. (As far as I could ascertain, the government handled it by ignoring it.)
John Hoopes organized a talk at his university on what he called “lost city hucksterism” entitled “The Lost City That Isn’t.” When I asked him what the talk would cover, he explained to me the discussion would be mostly aimed at helping students “think about how ‘hot’ issues such as those of colonialism, white supremacy, hypermasculinity, fantasy and imagination, [and] indigenous rights… intersect with the narratives that have been and are being spun about the White City.”
In mid-January I flew to Tegucigalpa to reenter the jungle and report on the excavation for National Geographic. I was curious to see how the president, his entourage, and the press were going to manage the snake-and disease-infested jungle. I also found myself stewing over the thought that the breathtaking perfection of the rainforest might have been ruined and the area degraded by human occupation, in which I had played a role.
My return trip to T1 began the morning of January 11, 2016, when a driver met me before dawn in Tegucigalpa for the long, overland trip to the airstrip, where an 8:00 a.m. military flight would take me into the valley. Virgilio had warned me to pack everything required for an overnight stay in the valley, including food and water, because helicopter transportation was uncertain and I would probably have to spend at least one night out there, maybe more. I tossed my overstuffed backpack into the back of the old pickup truck with a cracked windshield and government logos emblazoned on the side. We took off at high speed, the truck zooming through the deserted, postapocalyptic streets of the capital. We were soon out of the city and roaring up and down dizzying mountain roads. An hour later, high in the mountains, we were enveloped in a dense fog. The yellow lights of the oncoming cars and trucks loomed ominously, flaring up like fireworks, and then thundered past, the taillights winking out in the inky dark. As the light of dawn crept up, tatters of fog clung to the hillsides and filled the lowlands with mist. The Honduran interior is spectacularly beautiful and rugged, one mountain chain after the other, separated by deep green valleys. As we went up and down, the enchanted names of the villages flashed past—El Mago, Guaimaca, Campamento, Lepaguare, Las Joyas. They were the same towns we had passed a year before, but this time, shrouded in early morning mist, they looked otherworldly and aroused in me a sense of the inscrutability and “cognitive dissonance” of Honduras today.
We arrived at the Aguacate airstrip well in time for the flight, which was delayed by many hours. I was surprised to see how quickly the shabby terminal building had been smartly renovated into an archaeological laboratory. Next to that stood a brand-new military barracks, pale yellow cinder blocks with a corrugated tin roof—quarters for the soldiers rotating in and out of the site.
The Honduran helicopter, an olive-green Bell UH-1, was waiting on the tarmac. We eventually took off and an hour later we cleared the notch, the magical vale of T1 once more unrolling before us, stippled in sunlight. But as we slowed into a hover above the camp, my fears seemed confirmed: From the air the area along the river was unrecognizable. A new and bigger landing zone had been hacked out of the dense vegetation on the opposite side of the river, with a dirt landing pad marked with a giant red X in plastic strips.
We landed and I hopped out with my backpack, the chopper soon thundering back into the sky. Everything was different. I picked my way across withered heaps of macheted vegetation and crossed the river on a set of single logs laid in a zigzag fashion. A massive flood had scoured the valley after the 2015 expedition, washing away the old landing zone and turning it into a rocky island in the middle of the river. The flood had also changed the river’s course, carving a new channel closer to the embankment that led up to the camp. Luckily, the archaeological site, situated on the high terraces above the floodplain, had not been affected.