Lost City Of The Monkey God

Vicenda archeologica un po’ romanzata. In ogni momento sembra che si prepari il colpo di scena che in realtà non arriva mai.

A DISCOURSE ON CHANGE

The sun, lord of all, occupies the sky. Humans cannot share this space nor emulate this light. They are confined to the earth and consigned to the underworld, that realm of the nocturnal sun, upon their demise.

And demise came on a massive scale –not dynastic disputes, or wars of expansion, or trade and tariff discussion, but panic, pestilence and devastation– with the arrival of the Spaniards, who left entire populations depleted by measles and smallpox among many infectious diseases, to which they had no resistance. With this the local populations, surely those of the White City of Honduras, gathered their treasures and trophies, left a stash that seemed to them well hidden, and abandoned their cities, ignored their crops, departed their deities, and moved on.

The cities they left behind concern our author, who has provided a splendid book, an orderly book, exhaustive, meticulous, broken down by topics, concerning a mysterious, still unidentified culture in the world’s densest and most remote tropical forest, in Mosquitia, Honduras, Central America. This is a tale of adventure, technology, archaeology, pathology, which aroused more envy and meanness than delight in the professional community.

A great read, serious without being overly technical, we travel to pristine nature surrounded by every kind of danger, including drug cartels, land depletion, deforestation, official corruption, tropical diseases and an appalling lack of resources for dealing with any and all the above inconveniences.

One issue, however, persists. Our intrepid author insists on dividing the world into Old and New. These are outdated terms and very misleading. He also asks why European diseases decimated populations in the Americas, and not the other way around. Whoops! And syphilis? An American calling card to take home to Spain and Portugal. And yet mestizaje –cross-breeding– not to be confused with rape, flourished, equally among Germans, French and Belgians, less so among the always racist British. Colonialism was a nasty business.

As for diseases, commonly spread to human populations through contact with animals, a curious fact appears, in the paucity of domestic or “farmyard” animals in Mesoamerica, before the arrival of the Europeans. No cattle, no camillids, not even the noble Asian ass, that came to known as a burro. Men carried their own packs, made their way along paths they, themselves forged, and traded, indeed, but on a human scale. There was no animal large or strong enough to share their burden.

And another misnomer: back in the seventies a mindless politician referred to the First (or “developed”) World, the second or Soviet world, and the backward or undeveloped, “Third” World. The second faded away, took another form, adopted another name, the first and third remain, while the terms are used constantly and mean nothing, since development, like underprivilege are spotty across the planet.

The book is nonetheless riveting, not only for its detailing of the use of Lidar, a laser imaging, in archeological exploration, or the foraging for facts and presence of a “lost city” buried in an impenetrable jungle, or the questions raised regarding the origins and outcome of an unidentified and completely vanished people– perhaps hiding in plain sight among the present-day population of Honduras–but actually Douglas Prescott’s most relevant text is the statement on change. Life is an ever-shifting set of circumstances and their outcome. Survival requires adaptability and awareness. Even the most apparently “established societies”, as the 2016 election in the US revealed, can shift drastically, perhaps overnight. Change is the only constant in the universe.

An adventure that keeps you following it till the very end. An enjoyable and informative read.

Resultó mejor de lo que esperaba, la narración de los eventos es muy buena, mantiene el interés, el contenido es bastante interesante, pues toca diversos campos.
Narra la historia de una expedición a una región poco explorada de Honduras en busca de una ciudad pérdida de una cultura vecina a la maya.
La expedición ocurrió en el 2015, así que tal vez sea pronto para esperar conclusiones definitivas en este libro.
Sin embargo, el autor tiene bastante material que ofrecer respecto a todo lo que ocurrió para que dicha expedición pudiera llevarse a cabo.