The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The legend of the White City – Ciudad Blanca – has fascinated men for generations and many have gone searching for the lost city in the remote jungles of Moskitia in Honduras. One of these men is Steve Elkins, a self-described “cinematographer, a curious man, an adventurer” (p. 9) whom the author of the present book, Douglas Preston, discovers, befriends and eventually joins in the search. Preston, an accomplished writer and a veteran adventurer himself, with a history with the American Museum of Natural History and the National Geographic Society, becomes equally immersed in the effort to find and understand the disappeared city. The book is partly a real-life adventure story, but partly it gives a rather comprehensive history of the region and the archeological work surrounding it.

Following innovative use of LiDAR technology that identifies potential sites to start the search, an expedition is launched in the most inaccessible and hostile jungle valley to initiate an archeological study of the lost ‘City of the Monkey God.’ The obsessed Elkins is the driving force, but he receives backing from a variety of sources and also convinces the government of Honduras to endorse and support the effort. He puts together a mixed team that includes highly qualified archeological experts (led by Chris Fisher), as well as a film crew, photographers and others, including Preston. There is also a small band of former SAS agents providing security and survival skills to the team. Early on in the effort, a Honduras-based American fixer, Bruce Heinicke, with a dubious past in the drug trade provides his often unscrupulous services.

After a section on the history of the search for the city, the main part of the book focuses on the expedition, as it prepares for the field work and its stay on the site. This turns out to be a harrowing experience in the jungle that is infested with highly poisonous snakes and myriad insects, jaguars and other predators circling the campsite. During heavy rains the site floods and turns into mud. Despite their precautions the expedition members are soon covered in nasty bug bites.

The expedition is basically successful in its quest. However, an academic controversy rises around it when the news of the find come out and are widely advertised by the National Geographic Society. A group of American archeologists spearheaded by Christopher Begley of Transylvania University and Rosemary Joyce of UC Berkeley attack the effort on various grounds of “false claims of discovery” (their assertion is that the discovered city is much less of significance archeologically than Preston, Elkins and the National Geographic suggest) and “antiquated and offensive, ethnocentric attitudes” (in terms of dismissing local peoples’ knowledge of the area) (p. 186). Although the attacks seem exaggerated, at the very minimum – given that the expedition is fully endorsed at the highest level of Honduran authorities and is conducted very professionally under the supervision of well-respected archeologists – the controversy does not go away and the expedition continues to be accused of “B movie fantasy” resurrecting the “trope” of “the big hero explorer” (p. 188). In fact, I recently read a rather vitriolic review of the book (and another one, Jungleland by Christopher S. Stewart) written by Mark Bonta of Penn State for The AAG Review of Books (Fall 2017). In it, Bonta points to “the disconnections and conjunctions of scholars and the popular pseudoscientific imagination” (AAG p. 279).

Preston speculates for the reasons, the simplest of which might be professional jealousy, especially coming from Begley who himself has been compared to “modern day Indiana Jones” and known for traveling to Honduras with his own film crews. Another reason might be that the current Honduran president and administration came to power through a coup and replaced also the national archeological authorities that had supported Begley and the Americans. Be that as it may, many journalists picked up the controversy and had little interest in hearing both sides of the story. In the end, the site is being excavated and preserved with the full support of Honduras, including President Hernández.

Although the adventure at the heart of the book is well told and interesting, to me the most important part of the book is the last third. There has been a lot of speculation why the thriving (and controversial) City of the Monkey God suddenly disappeared five centuries ago with its inhabitants abandoning it over a short period of time. The explanation seems to hinge on brutal epidemics that devastated the old Mesoamerican (and beyond) indigenous cultures as the Spanish conquistadores arrived. The native populations who had no resistance to the Old World diseases succumbed in incredible numbers, so that even 90 percent of the populations died. This was of course an add-on to the “cruelty, slavery, rape, abuse, starvation, war and genocide” inflicted on the people by the Spanish, English and other invaders (p. 295). Preston cites the work of Jared Diamond whose famous book Collapse describes the historical collapse of many civilizations around the world through environmental overstretch, disease, invaders and other factors (I might note that Diamond, too, as a scientist prone to popularizing knowledge and using grand theories to explain change is reviled in some academic circles).

Ironically, about half of the expedition members, including Preston, catch a seemingly incurable tropical disease, leishmaniasis, during their stay in the jungle. Perhaps the scariest conclusion of the book is that these kinds of diseases that today are the daily reality of mostly poor people living in the tropics, are becoming more common also in the developed countries in the North. The main reasons for this are the increased air travel that rapidly transports people between different part of the world and, importantly, climate change that makes previously safe areas in North America, Europe and Asia (including Japan) more susceptible to tropical parasites and their hosts and vectors. This unfortunate fact raises the likelihood of a major global pandemic that could devastate societies and economies. The only positive aspect of this is that, perhaps, more investment will go to research and the development of drugs and vaccines now that people in the wealthy and powerful North are threatened.

On a personal level, the book made me think about my forthcoming trip to the Amazon rainforest next week where there is a current epidemic of yellow fever and dengue, and where the nurse in my office told me to use a double protection of insect repellent against horse flies and other biting insects. Little good did these precautions do to Preston and his mates.


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