La Ciudad Blanca
In May 2012, press releases issued by a team led by documentary film maker Steve Elkins and by the Honduran government about remote sensing exploration using LiDAR renewed interest in the legend.
[15] Popular accounts of the Ciudad Blanca claim it was a city of great wealth, associated with the town or Province of Taguzgalpa east of Trujillo, that the Spanish on repeated occasions tried to conquer but could not.
"So wonderful are the reports about this particular province," he wrote, "that even allowing largely for exaggeration, it will exceed Mexico in riches, and equal it in the size of its towns and villages, the density of its population, and the culture of its inhabitants.
When he described his discoveries in the best-selling, two-volume Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán, with illustrations by his partner Frederick Catherwood, the public's imagination was ignited.
[39] In his paper, Spinden identified a "Chorotegan" culture whose material remains were found in a region that extended from central Honduras to eastern and northwestern Costa Rica.
He reported, photographed, and described large, elaborately stone metates and cylindrical vessels that had been found as surface finds in Mosquitia and which he collected for the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.
However, author Jason Colavito notes, "So far as I know, Lindbergh’s 1927 claim is where many believe the name Ciudad Blanca comes from, but even this isn’t certain since this legend saw print only in the 1950s, some three decades after the fact.
[43] According to Strong, Spinden, who visited the area in 1924, "does not describe any ruins but mentions the occurrence of stone bowls with animal and bird heads, and great metates and slabs similar to those at Las Mercedes in Costa Rica.
[5] The goal of the expedition was to further study the local indigenous people, explore archaeological sites, chart the upper reaches of the Wampú River, and search for a rumored "lost city.
[5] In an article for The American Weekly, a Sunday magazine tabloid edited by fantasy fiction author A. Merritt,[50] he claimed to have evidence of large, ruined buildings.
[51][55] Morde and Brown brought back thousands of artifacts, most of which became part of the collection of the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian in New York City.
[48] The artifacts are now part of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.[5] Morde vowed to return to Honduras in January 1941 to undertake further study and excavate the "city," but did not.
[61] According to Dr. Chris Begley, there have been people in what is now the Rio Plátano Biosphere and the Ciudad Blanca area for at least 3,000 years[62] A 1976 expedition by David Zink and archaeologist Edwin M. Shook was filmed by a television crew.
Ted Danger) undertook various expeditions in search of Ciudad Blanca that were sponsored by an organization he founded called the Society for the Exploration and Preservation of Honduras (SEPH).
[69] Dr. Chris Begley did not agree with this identification and felt that the peoples native to the Mosquitia adopted traits like ball courts, stone-sided temple mounds with stairs reaching 12 meters high, walled cities, white stone paved roads down to the rivers and between parts of the sites, the extensive use of stone corn grinding stones, terraced agriculture, the use of fine orange pottery, the adoption of incised punctates and dots designs (such as were found on Fine Orange and coarser ceramics in Cholula in the Classic Period),[70] and the use of caves for ceremonial purposes such as are found at the archaeological site of Las Crucitas on the Aner river near the Guampu River from contact with Mesoamerican neighbors and traders.
[72] Francis Yakam-Simen, Edmond Nezry, and James Ewing used the remote sensing method of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images to "identify and locate the lost city" in thick vegetation.
[74] During the 1990s, documentary film maker Steve Elkins became fascinated by the legend and made multiple trips into the Honduran rain forests in search of a "lost city", but did not find it.
[5] In 2009, he learned that a team led by archaeologists Arlen and Diane Chase of the University of Central Florida used LiDAR to map a 200 square kilometres (20,000 ha) area covering most of the Vaca Plateau in Belize that includes the ruins of Caracol, a Maya site located in a dense rainforest.
[5] When he learned of the find, Áfrico Madrid, the Minister of Interior, informed Honduran President Porfirio Lobo Sosa that he believed Ciudad Blanca had been located.
"[5] However, she confirmed that the images did show what appeared to be archaeological features and remarked there were what seemed to be: "...three major clusters of larger structures, a plaza, a public space par excellence, and a possible ball court, and many house mounds.
"[5] In May 2013, Elkins' archaeological team announced additional details based on further analysis of the LiDAR data, and news media once again promoted the legend of a "lost city".
[17] Jason Colavito, an author and blogger about pseudoarchaeology, identifies promotion of the "White City" myth as part of a neoliberal strategy to bring tourism to Honduras.
[90] In mid-June 2012, archaeologist Christopher Fisher of Colorado State University, a Mesoamerican specialist with expertise in Western Mexico,[91] joined the UTL project.
The work was conducted by a joint Honduran American archaeological team under the direction of Virgilio Paredes, Director of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia.
[101] To date, the most extensive archaeological survey of the Department of Gracias a Dios was conducted by Begley, who documented dozens of sites with significant architectural remains.
[5] In June 2012, Honduran daily newspaper El Heraldo featured a multi-part series on the legend of Ciudad Blanca and archaeological remains in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve.
"[5] In a Pech story called the "Patatahua", collected by anthropologist Lazaro Flores, the people of Ciudad Blanca were "allied with the spirits of the great storms" such as the Thundergods.
[55] In 2012, Honduran filmmaker Juan Luís Franconi directed El Xendra, a feature-length science fiction motion picture filmed in Honduras.
"[104][105] In his 2013 nonfiction book Jungleland, journalist Christopher S. Stewart recounts his exploration of the rainforest habitat of Gracias a Dios in search of Ciudad Blanca.
[107] The documentary film Lost City of the Monkey God,[108] produced and directed by Bill Benenson and featuring Steve Elkins and Douglas Preston along with critics of the project such as archaeologist Rosemary Joyce, premiered on the Science Channel, which is owned by Discovery, Inc.,[109] on October 31, 2021.
