Modern travel has given infectious disease new ways to spread. Bubonic plague in the fourteenth century traveled from Central Asia to the Levant and Europe by horse, camel, and boat; the Zika virus in the twenty-first century jumped from Yap Island in Micronesia to French Polynesia, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Central America by 2015, all by plane. In the summer of 2016, Zika arrived in Miami, again on an airplane. The 2009 outbreak of deadly H1N1 swine flu in Mexico hitched rides on planes to strike as far away as Japan, New Zealand, Egypt, Canada, and Iceland. As Richard Preston noted in his terrifying book The Hot Zone, “A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plane flight from every city on earth.”
The world’s last great pandemic was the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918 that killed a hundred million people—about 5 percent of the world’s population. If a pandemic like that were to happen again, it would spread faster and might be impossible to contain. According to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in such a pandemic “the death toll could reach 360 million”—even with the full deployment of vaccines and powerful modern drugs. The Gates Foundation estimated that the pandemic would also devastate the world financially, precipitating a three-trillion-dollar economic collapse. This is not scaremongering: Most epidemiologists believe such a pandemic will eventually happen.
Archaeology contains many cautionary tales for us to ponder in the twenty-first century, not just about disease but also about human success and failure. It teaches us lessons in environmental degradation, income inequality, war, violence, class division, exploitation, social upheaval, and religious fanaticism. But archaeology also teaches us how cultures have thrived and endured, overcoming the challenges of the environment and the darker side of human nature. It shows us how people adapted, lived their lives, and found fulfillment and meaning under fantastically diverse conditions. It tracks both the failures and the successes. It tells us how cultures faced difficulty and challenge, sometimes in successful ways and sometimes in ways that, while successful at first, sowed the seeds of eventual collapse. The Maya created a vibrant and brilliant society that, in the end, failed to adjust to a changing environment and the needs of its people; so did the Roman Empire and the ancient Khmer, to pluck civilizations randomly out of the hat. But the people of the City of the Jaguar did adapt to the challenges of the rainforest, and they continued to thrive in one of the harshest environments on the planet, transforming it into a beautiful garden—until their abrupt demise.
I can recall the very moment when we stumbled over the cache and I first saw that jaguar head coming out of the ground. Gleaming with rain, it rose up snarling, as if struggling to escape the earth. It was an image that spoke directly to me across the centuries—forging an immediate, emotive connection to these vanished people. What had been theoretical for me became real: This spirited image had been created by people who were confident, accomplished, and formidable. Standing in the gloom among the ancient mounds, I could almost feel the presence of the invisible dead. At its zenith, the people of the city of T1, the City of the Jaguar, must have felt nearly invulnerable in their valley redoubt ringed by mountains. What power could overthrow their mighty gods and potent rituals? But the unseen invader ghosted in and visited upon them a destruction that was as impossible to resist as it was to predict. Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over.
No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.
View of the River Pao. The lost city lies on an unnamed tributary upstream from this river.
The opening pages of William Duncan Strong’s 1933 Honduran journal. Strong was one of the first legitimate archaeologists to penetrate the region.
Sam Glassmire in 1959, hunting for the White City, with one of his guides.
Sam Glassmire’s hand-drawn map showing the location of the “Lost City” he discovered on an expedition in 1960.
The valley of T1, deep in Mosquitia and ringed by almost impenetrable mountains, remained one of the last scientifically unexplored places on earth until the expedition arrived there in February 2015.
Theodore Morde traveling up the Patuca River by motorized pitpan, or dugout canoe, Mosquitia, Honduras, 1940.
The Cessna Skymaster containing a million-dollar lidar machine and its highly classified payload being guarded by Honduran soldiers. The plane flew missions over three unexplored valleys in the remote mountains of Mosquitia in 2012.
Dr. Juan Carlos Fernández, engineer from the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston and the lidar mission planner, operates the lidar machine during the May 4, 2012 overflight of the T1 valley that discovered the ancient city.
The author jammed in the back of the Cessna, ready to depart on the historic overflight of the T1 valley.
On his first expedition looking for the White City in 1994, Steve Elkins found this carved rock deep in the jungle showing a man planting seeds, and he had a revelation that in Pre-Columbian times a major farming civilization had lived in what is today almost impassible jungle.
Steve Elkins photographed jumping a hedge as he was running to see the first images of the lost city found by lidar in the valley of T1—the culmination of his 20-year search.
In Roatán, Honduras, examining the first lidar image of the lost city, 2012. From left: Steve Elkins; Bill Benenson (behind); Michael Sartori (seated); Virgilio Paredes; Tom Weinberg; and the author, Douglas Preston.
Two lidar images of a hilltop portion of T1, the first in grayscale and the second in a rotated, color-scale format. This large, mountaintop ruin has not yet been explored.
A lidar image of the heart of the city of T1, showing the cache location and other features of importance. In Pre-Columbian times, it had been a landscape entirely modified and engineered by the ancient people of Mosquitia.
Bruce Heinicke, fixer, gold prospector, former drug smuggler for the Colombian cartel, and archaeological looter, who was instrumental in helping find the lost city.
The expedition’s Astar helicopter being unloaded in the jungle landing zone below the ruins of T1.
Chris Fisher (behind), the expedition’s chief archaeologist, and the author explore the unnamed river flowing through the valley of T1 below the ruins.
Tom Weinberg, the expedition’s official chronicler, taking notes on his laptop deep in the jungles of Mosquitia, 2015.
The jungle at dawn, seen from the banks of the unknown river flowing through the valley, 2015.
The author’s campsite below the ruins, shortly before it turned into a sea of mud in the relentless rain. A troupe of spider monkeys lived in the trees above and shook branches and screeched at the author, trying to get him to move. At night, the ground was covered with cockroaches and spiders while jaguars roamed about.
A fer-de-lance, one of the world’s deadliest snakes, entered the camp the first night and had to be killed. Its fangs were over an inch long. The head was tied to a tree in camp by an expedition leader to impress on everyone the high risk of snakes.