The Lost City of the Monkey God
Since the days of conquistador Hernán Cortés, rumors have circulated about a lost city of immense wealth hidden somewhere in the Honduran interior, called the White City or the Lost City of the Monkey God. Indigenous tribes speak of ancestors who fled there to escape the Spanish invaders, and they warn that anyone who enters this sacred city will fall ill and die. In 1940, swashbuckling journalist Theodore Morde returned from the rainforest with hundreds of artifacts and an electrifying story of having found the Lost City of the Monkey God--but then committed suicide without revealing its location. Three quarters of a century later, bestselling author Douglas Preston joined a team of scientists on a groundbreaking new quest. In 2012 he climbed aboard a rickety, single-engine plane carrying the machine that would change everything: lidar, a highly advanced, classified technology that could map the terrain under the densest rainforest canopy. In an unexplored valley ringed by steep mountains, that flight revealed the unmistakable image of a sprawling metropolis, tantalizing evidence of not just an undiscovered city but an enigmatic, lost civilization. Venturing into this raw, treacherous, but breathtakingly beautiful wilderness to confirm the discovery, Preston and the team battled torrential rains, quickmud, disease-carrying insects, jaguars, and deadly snakes.
Stats for nerds
4recommend
5mentions
4people
2017–2023years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- There was a good book about a recent discovery a few years ago, Lost City of the Monkey God. The locals had stories about some city in the jungle. The team managed to find it with LIDAR, but it was a slow, difficult process. They then had to land in fairly distant clearing and hike to the location. From there the team had trouble finding ruins even when they had their exact location, even once standing in right the middle of the city. The jungle hides a lot. The team members also came down with cutaneous leishmaniasis. Finding locations might be getting easier, but I imagine it would be difficult to find people with the right combination of skill and willingness to die a slow, agonizing, and disfiguring death to actually excavate some of them.
- “The Lost City of the Monkey God” is an absolutely fantastic read if you’re interested in the usage of LiDAR for archeological discovery.
- LIDAR is really cool. The coolest use I know of is that a man named Steve Elkins used it in Honduras to discover lost ancient archaeological sites a few years ago. If you're interested read The Lost City of the Monkey God, it will blow your hair back.
- I'm reading "Lost City of the Monkey God" by Douglas Preston right now. It's been a highly entertaining first-hand account of (what I think was) the first use of LIDAR for archaeology in the jungles of Central America, and the ground exploration that followed. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who's interested in this story.
- Here's quite a few, but they might be of interest to others.
1. You Have the Right to Remain Innocent: great advice that I had never seen anywhere else (except his video that started the whole thing).
2. The Vital Question: good overview of origin of life research.
3. Fragment: hard science fiction (is that the term?) that delved into evolution and dovetailed with some of the reading I had been doing around that subject.
4. The Science of Navigation: delved into the wonder of current navigational technology and how we got to here.
5. The Lost City of the Monkey God: bought on a lark, made me realize that archaeology can still find new things nowadays.
6. Island of the Lost: historical account of two shipwrecks on the same island at the same time that knew nothing of each other.
7. Protecting the Gift: another eye-opener about being more aware of the ways people _can_ prey on children.
8. Wondrous Contrivances: how people reacted to new techologies in the past.
9. Rig Ship for Ultra Quiet: submariner's account of life during a Cold War operation.
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