New pictures claim to show the possible architectural remains of Ciudad Blanca, a mythical "White City" rumored to be buried somewhere deep in the forests of eastern Honduras.
The 3-D maps are a continuation of a project that made headlines last year when researchers used a special aerial light radar to survey Honduras' remote Mosquita region, believed to contain the legendary lost city.
The newly-released, computer-generated images provide more detail of what might lie beneath a nearly impenetrable jungle teeming with snakes, mosquitoes, and other lethal creatures. That could be "cities, villages, roads, canals, ceremonial sites, terraced agricultural land, and more," according to a statement from the American Geophysical Union.
The legend of Ciudad Blanca
Ciudad Blanca may never have existed at all.
The sprawling ancient city is a "20th century invention," says Rosemary Joyce, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
The legend was started in the 1920s when Hondurans flying over the forest saw a set of features that they thought looked like gleaming white buildings, Joyce explained.
The pilots tried to interpret what they saw using early Spanish sources. At some point, the site was linked to a letter written in 1526 by Spanish explorer Hernan Cortés to Charles I of Spain, where the adventurer spoke of "very large and wealthy provinces with wealthy lords."
The hondurans believed the white structures they saw were once part of the large, wealthy province that Cortés described. As a result, most reports today wrongly attribute Cortés with "discovering" the potentially made-up city.
In fact, if you were to fly over Honduras now, you would probably see the stone monuments from early 20th century observations. But researchers continue to search for Ciudad Blanca, hung up on modern myth.
A new way of mapping
To make the 3-D maps, researchers used LiDAR, or light detection and ranging, a mapping technology that uses a plane to shoot billions of laser beams down into thick forests. The lasers can cut through dense tree cover to get elevation models of geographic features underneath.
The digital images may show sunken or raised regions of different shapes, which researchers interpret as possible architectural remains of an ancient city.
The project involves an international team of scientists and officials from the University of Houston, the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, Colorado State University, and the Honduran government, but all of the planning, logistics support, and information disseminated to media comes from a company called UTL Scientific.
UTL Scientific is not a scientific organization, Rus Sheptak, a historical anthropologist who specializes in Honduras, pointed out in a blog post. It is a film company created to produce a documentary about the search for Ciudad Blanca. The film is being co-directed by Steve Elkins and Bill Beneson.
Additionally, the international research team working with UTL does not include specialists in Honduran archeology, says Joyce. "You need to have someone who knows the archeology of the country," she said.
The search continues
UTL is careful not to make any claims that they discovered Ciudad Blanca — only that they found some kind of archaeological site — but it's easy to get the facts twisted.
Joyce put it well in a post she wrote for the Berkley Blog last June when UTL released the first LiDAR images from Honduras.
"It is clear that there are archaeological sites in the areas surveyed by the LiDAR team," she wrote. Adding that LiDAR "cannot tell you what time period those sites were built or occupied, what the external relations of those sites were, what activities people carried out there."
To be fair, anthropologists working closely with the project admit that Ciudad Blanca may forever elude our sensing techniques, because of the dense forest that lies over its remains (why they simply don't go down there on foot is a nagging question).
"We may never be able to tell whether any of these are Ciudad Blanca, or whether the legendary city ever existed," Colorado State University professors Christopher Fisher and Stephen Leisz said in a statement. "But we can clearly see in the UTL data evidence that there was a densely settled region with a human-modified environment. These conclusions provide important new insights into the pre-Hispanic settlement of this largely unexplored region."