The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story

Preston arrives at the NIH for diagnosis and treatment. His physician, Dr. Nash, explains the disease and treatment to him in excruciating detail. His prescribed treatment is a drug called amphotericin B, which can cause highly variable and intense side effects. Dave Yoder, the team’s photographer, describes to Preston the nightmare of his treatment, which had to be halted due to kidney damage.

Preston describes his experience with amphotericin B. He avoids the extreme side effects of chest pressure and an intense fear of dying that Yoder and Fisher endured before him. Preston makes it through treatment and is in remission, though he notes that his leishmaniasis symptoms appear to be returning.

He then describes his tour of the leishmaniasis research lab at NIH, matter-of-factly describing the controlled infection of sand flies and mice. The development of treatments and vaccines is difficult because “the people who have leishmaniasis have no money” (266). Infected people tend to be rural and poor, and drug companies see no market in developing treatments.

Their strain of leishmaniasis is a hybrid between two species, and Preston hypothesizes that this may be due to the long-distance trade networks that the Mosquitia cities participated in. When the city was abandoned, the leishmaniasis strain began to mutate on its own. This moment can potentially be dated via its “molecular clock,” or the rate of mutation, although Preston does not return to this point.

The book’s focus returns to T1. The site continues to be guarded by the Honduran military, who take precautions to avoid leishmaniasis. Controversy continues, with some academics and indigenous groups in Honduras criticizing the excavations as “denigrating, discriminatory, and racist” (274).

The sculpture cache is excavated a year after the T1 expedition, led by Fisher, and Preston returns to cover the excavation. He describes with melancholy the vast changes and human impact in the T1 valley near the site. The camps are more open and invasive into the jungle, and the wildlife has escaped further into the woods. The site, at least, is still untouched, “dark, unfathomable, muttering with animal sounds” (278).

After a near helicopter crash and further cases of leishmaniasis, Fisher decides it is too risky to continue archaeological work at T1. Preston climbs a pyramid and muses that it might be better if no more work is done here, so “that this spot might never lose its mystery” (283).

The next day, current Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández visits the site for photo ops at the cache excavation. Preston leaves with the president and others, and witnesses a well-choreographed press conference. The president hopes the site’s discovery will help form a more unified Honduran national identity. He names the T1 site La Ciudad del Jaguar, or the City of the Jaguar.

Preston describes the different evolutionary links between humans and diseases in the Old World and the New World. In the Old World humans were exposed to disease much more frequently, and they gradually developed immunities over time. This process did not occur to nearly the same degree in the New World, where urban settlements were more recent and disease-carrying livestock was less important. This left New World populations more genetically vulnerable to Old World diseases.

Just when New World populations were at massive levels, organized into countless large cities, Old World diseases were introduced, creating “a perfect storm of infection” (292). Preston describes how mortality rates of over 90 percent devastated civilizations and created societal collapse that left cities abandoned and traditions lost. The New World pandemic was “the greatest catastrophe ever to befall the human species” (294). He implores the reader to imagine how such an epidemic would affect them.

Preston argues that such a deadly meeting between the Old and New Worlds was inevitable, baked into the genetic makeup of each population. He notes that now the world is divided into the First World and the Third World, and that Third World diseases (like leishmaniasis) are now making their way into the First World due to climate change. He illustrates this process with the spread of leishmaniasis into the United States in recent years. We must stop ignoring the suffering of Third Worlders to solve this crisis, he argues. Archaeology provides us with examples of both rises and collapses, successes and failures, and we must learn from them.