An Ancient City Emerges in a Remote Rain Forest

Most of the important archaeological sites in Central America were "discovered" by archaeologists who, in fact, didn't discover them at all but were led to the ruins by local people. I've known several Maya archaeologists who routinely started fieldwork in a new area by heading into a dive bar and hoisting beers with the locals while listening to various bullshitters spin tales about ruins they'd seen in the jungle; once in a while, a story would turn out to be true. But, because these sites were long known to local people, they had invariably been disturbed, if not badly looted. The revelation of an ancient city in a valley in the Mosquitia mountains, of Honduras, one of the last scientifically unexplored regions on Earth, was a different story. This was the first time a large archaeological site had been discovered in a purely speculative search using a technology called LIDAR, or "light detection and ranging," which can map terrain through the thickest jungle foliage, an event I chronicled in a story for the magazine in 2013.