(Photo : courtesy Facebook)
Posted on 05/18/2013 11:55:34 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Underneath the Honduran rain forests' dense canopy of trees, a team of researchers think they may have found the ruins of la Ciudad Blanca - the White City --- a legendary city of gold sought by Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes.
In a 1526 letter to Spanish Emperor Charles V, Cortes described an area in the interior of Honduras with riches far greater than those of Mexico.
In 1839, according to a report by Nature World News, American diplomat and aspiring archaeologist John Lloyd Sturges went out in search of ruins in western Honduras and found the Mayan city of Copan, which he bought from a local landowner for fifty dollars.
Stephens then continued to explore other ruins in Central America and eventually published accounts of his discoveries in a best-selling coffee table book; but, he never found the White City.
Since Stephens' adventures, scholars have generally avoided the dense, dangerous jungles east and south of Copan, considering the people who lived there to be "primitive."
Today, after about 500-years-worth of tales about it have been told, scientists may finally have found the lost White City.
An exploration team that included researchers from the University of Houston, along with documentary filmmaker Steven Elkins and project underwriter Bill Benenson, scanned the forest with laser-based equipment aboard a slow, low-altitude aircraft. They eventually identified what appear to be remnants of long-forgotten civilization, complete with canals, ceremonial sites and terraced agriculture.
The scanning process, according to an explanation in The New Yorker, employed an imaging technique known as light-detection-and-ranging, which bombards the terrain of an area being studied with billions of laser pulses to gain an image of what lies beneath the leafy canopy.
(Excerpt) Read more at latinospost.com ...
(Photo : courtesy Facebook)
|
|
|
| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
|
|
To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list. |
|
|
|
|
Wow.
They finally found it!
Keep the dam bulldozers away from it!
It’s a very Green city. They must be very progressive. Do they worship Al Gore? :)
What are the coordinates? Would like to see the area via google earth.
It would be nice to see the scans as well as the canopy of trees. Sigh...
I guess they’re not ready to release them just yet, and maybe they’re saving them for the National Geographic.
LOL! :-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
