Have archaeologists discovered the mysterious lost city of Ciudad Blanca?
Have archaeologists discovered the mysterious lost city of Ciudad Blanca?
Honduras's ancient metropolis ‘found’ using revolutionary 3D mapping technique
Tim Walker
Tuesday 14 May 2013
The Google Map of eastern Honduras is almost blank. A vast and virtually unexplored rainforest region known as the Mosquitia covers around 32,000 square miles, home to dense jungle, hostile terrain and the terrifying-sounding jumping viper. Legend has it that somewhere beneath the forest canopy lies the ancient city of Ciudad Blanca – and now archaeologists think they may have found it.
Tomorrow in Cancun, Mexico, an interdisciplinary group of scientists from fields including archaeology, anthropology and geology will appear at the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference to present the technology that has allowed them to discover a “lost world” in the Honduran interior. The team photographed the ground using new technology known as airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR). They found what appears to be a network of plazas and pyramids, hidden for hundreds of years.
The legend of Ciudad Blanca (“The White City”) has captivated Western explorers ever since the Conquistador Hernan Cortes mentioned it in a letter to Spanish Emperor Charles V in 1526. Cortes never found the city, nor the gold it was said to contain, and the inhospitable region remained unconquered by the Europeans. In 1940, an American adventurer, Theodore Morde, emerged from the jungle claiming to have a found a “lost city of the monkey god”, where the local indigenous people worshipped huge ape sculptures. He was said to have been tipped off about the ruins by Charles Lindbergh, the first solo aviator to cross the Atlantic, who glimpsed “an amazing ancient metropolis” when he was flying above the forest. Morde was killed in a car accident before he could reveal its location.
Steve Elkins, a film-maker and amateur archaeologist from Los Angeles, became interested in the legend during the 1990s, when he travelled to the region in an unsuccessful attempt to find the rumoured ruins of Ciudad Blanca. “Some people believe it’s a bunch of hooey. Others believe that where there’s smoke there’s fire,” said Elkins, who is now 62. “I became captivated by it, and I decided to wait until technology advanced to produce a better way to find it than walking aimlessly through the jungle. Many years later, that opportunity presented itself.”
More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/news/have-archaeologists-discovered-the-mysterious-lost-city-of-ciudad-blanca-8616240.html
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Are These the First Ever Pictures of Honduras's Lost Ciudad Blanca?
Explorers have been searching on foot for Honduras's mythical city for generations. Now, they seem to have found it from a tiny Cessna airplane, aided by million-dollar technology.
Rebecca J. RosenMay 15 2013, 4:37 PM ET
The Mosquitia rain forests of Honduras and Nicaragua are, to put it mildly, thick jungle. As one travel guide notes, "While the edges of the Mosquitia can be reached by pickups driving along the beach, the vast majority of the region is accessible only by plane, boat, or foot, lending it the feel of a separate country, cut off from the rest of Honduras and the world."
The lushness of this biosphere -- at 32,000 square miles, "the largest remaining expanse of virgin tropical jungle in Central America" -- draws its share of adventurers and nature lovers each year, but that is not its most remarkable appeal. Over the past century, archaeologists have set their sights on that dense vegetation, hoping that beneath it they would find the ruins of Ciudad Blanca, a fabled ancient settlement seemingly swallowed by the Earth. In 1526, Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes wrote to emperor Charles V, relaying word of a purported province, deep in Honduras, that "will exceed Mexico in riches, and equal it in the largeness of its towns and villages."
Today, at the American Geophysical Union's meeting in Cancun, scientists have released images of what they believe to be that lost city, discovered not by machete-hacking their way through the jungle, but from above, in a tiny Cessna plane, the bottom of which had been cut open to make room for a million-dollar LIDAR machine, which can see through the forest canopy and map the topography below.
"This whole adventure for the last couple years has been quite a wild ride," the expedition's leader Steve Elkins told me on the phone from Cancun. "There were times I felt like if I didn't find anything, everybody would say, 'What a fool you are. You spent all this money, all this effort. There's nothing there.'" But maybe, just maybe, they would get lucky, and the LIDAR would see something -- walls, pyramids, symmetry, straight lines of any kind -- that was at odds with the natural contours of the jungle floor. Something, maybe, like this, the first ever visual confirmation of a lost civilization in the Mosquitia forest:
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[/center]More:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/are-these-the-first-ever-pictures-of-hondurass-lost-ciudad-blanca/275877/