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The expedition has surveyed the ruins. They’ve mapped plazas, mounds and pyramids.
Most significantly, an cache of stone sculptures has found — untouched since the site was abandoned up to 1000 years ago.
Ceremonial seats. Carved vessels. Stylised creatures.
All are richly adorned with stylised snakes and vultures.
Significantly, some capture a blend of human and animal features suggesting a transformation between the two states. It’s a theme commonly attributed to Central American shamans (priest-magicians).
National Geographic reports Christopher Fisher, leader of the expedition, as saying the stash of 52 artefacts may have been an offering — but its significance is uncertain.
The exact location of the find is being kept secret to protect it from looters.
An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with dramatic news of the discovery of a mysterious culture's lost city, never before explored. The team was led to the remote, uninhabited region by long-standing rumors that it was the site of a storied "White City," also referred to in legend as the "City of the Monkey God."
Archaeologists surveyed and mapped extensive plazas, earthworks, mounds, and an earthen pyramid belonging to a culture that thrived a thousand years ago, and then vanished. The team, which returned from the site last Wednesday, also discovered a remarkable cache of stone sculptures that had lain untouched since the city was abandoned.
In contrast to the nearby Maya, this vanished culture has been scarcely studied and it remains virtually unknown. Archaeologists don't even have a name for it.
Christopher Fisher, a Mesoamerican archaeologist on the team from Colorado State University, said the pristine, unlooted condition of the site was "incredibly rare." He speculated that the cache, found at the base of the pyramid, may have been an offering.
"The undisturbed context is unique," Fisher said. "This is a powerful ritual display, to take wealth objects like this out of circulation."
The tops of 52 artifacts were peeking from the earth. Many more evidently lie below ground, with possible burials. They include stone ceremonial seats (called metates) and finely carved vessels decorated with snakes, zoomorphic figures, and vultures.
The most striking object emerging from the ground is the head of what Fisher speculated might be "a were-jaguar," possibly depicting a shaman in a transformed, spirit state. Alternatively, the artifact might be related to ritualized ball games that were a feature of pre-Columbian life in Mesoamerica.
The ruins were first identified in May 2012, during an aerial survey of a remote valley in La Mosquitia, a vast region of swamps, rivers, and mountains containing some of the last scientifically unexplored places on earth.
originally posted by: WillLik
a reply to: daaskapital
I thought this sounded familiar.
I think it's even marked on my google earth.
Morde also related a story about a monkey who had stolen three women with whom it bred, resulting in half-monkey half-human children. He claimed, “The native name for monkey is Urus, which translates literally into ‘sons of the hairy men.’ Their fathers, or fore-fathers, are the Ulaks, half-man and half-spirit, who lived on the ground, walked upright and had the appearance of great hairy ape-men.” According to journalist Wendy Griffin, Nahuat speakers repeated a similar story to anthropologist James Taggart many years later. In Morde's version , the hybrid children were hunted for revenge, while in the Nahuat version the child grew up to be Nahuehue, a Thunderbolt god.
Theodore Morde, writing of his adventures in US magazine The American Weekly, said that local tribes people told him of the monkey worshiping civilization and went on with even more outlandish suggestions that a monkey from the city. Locals even told him that one 'monkey god' from the city kidnapped a local woman and bred half-human, half-chimp children. The children were then hunted for revenge.
It inspired the Dance Of The Dead Monkeys, during which locals roast monkeys over a fire in an apparent act of revenge for stealing their virgins.