A series of droughts between AD 760 and 800 seem to have been the trigger for famine that hit the common people disproportionately hard. It was the last straw for a society teetering on the edge of alienation and conflict. Here was proof the holy lords were not delivering on their social promises. All building projects halted; the last inscription found in the city dates to 822; and around 850, the royal palace burned. The city never recovered. Some people died of disease and starvation, but the majority of the peasant and artisan classes appear to have simply walked away. Over the centuries the region experienced a relentless population decline, and by 1250, the Copán valley had largely returned to jungle wilderness. The same process occurred in the other Maya city-states, not all at once, but in a staggered fashion.

From AD 400 to 800, during the rise of Copán, small settlements in Mosquitia sprang up and grew at a modest rate. But when Copán fell apart, the civilization in Mosquitia experienced the opposite: a tremendous flowering. By AD 1000, even as most of the Maya cities had been left to the monkeys and birds, the ancient inhabitants of Mosquitia were building their own cities, which were starting to look vaguely Maya in layout, with plazas, elevated platforms, earthworks, geometric mounds, and earthen pyramids. This is also when they seem to have adopted the Mesoamerican ball game.

How were these ancient people of the Mosquitia rainforest able to settle and thrive in a snake-and disease-ridden jungle, an area far more challenging than most lands settled by the Maya? What was their relationship to their powerful neighbors, and what allowed them to flourish even as Copán was crumbling? In other words, how did they survive what the Maya couldn’t—and what eventually brought them down?

While the Maya are the most studied of ancient cultures in the Americas, the people of Mosquitia have been among the least—a question mark embodied by the legend of the White City. This culture is so little known that it hasn’t even been given a formal name. In this context, the discovery and continued exploration of T1 and T3 become enormously significant, bringing the region to the world’s attention and representing a turning point in our understanding of these vanished people. It was a formidable civilization, occupying over ten thousand square miles of eastern Honduras, at the crossroads of trade and travel between Mesoamerica and the powerful Chibchan-speaking civilizations to the south.

The excavation of T1 is shedding light on this culture, but also deepening its mystery. “There is much we don’t know about this great culture,” Oscar Neil told me. “What we don’t know is, in fact, almost everything.” Only a small number of archaeological sites have been identified in Mosquitia, and none have been fully excavated. The archaeology that has been done is not enough to answer even the most basic questions about the culture. As one archaeologist said, “There aren’t a lot of people who want to undergo the kind of pain it takes to work out there.” Until the lidar images of T1 and T3 were made, not a single large site in Mosquitia had even been comprehensively mapped.

We do know from recent archaeology in other rainforest environments—such as the Maya lowlands and the Amazon basin—that complex farming societies were able to thrive in even the toughest rainforest areas. Human ingenuity is boundless. Rainforest farmers developed clever strategies for enriching soil. In the Amazon, for example, they overcame the poor rainforest soils by mixing them with charcoal and other nutrients to create an artificial soil called terra preta, or “black earth,” built into raised beds for intensive farming. There may be as much as fifty thousand square miles in the Amazon covered in this artificially enriched black soil—a staggering accomplishment that tells us Amazonia was densely settled in pre-Columbian times. (If a lidar survey were done of the Amazon basin, it would be, without doubt, an absolute revelation.) So far, almost no research has been done on how the people of Mosquitia farmed their rainforest environment. At T1, we found probable irrigation canals and a reservoir that would have helped make farming possible during the quasi-dry season from January to April. But beyond that there is much, much more to be learned.

The ancient people of Mosquitia were neglected by researchers partly because of their very proximity to the Maya, as John Hoopes acknowledges. “In this area, these people are in the shadow of the Maya,” he told me. “There are only a few really high-profile archaeological cultures in the world: Egypt and the Maya. That draws people and resources away from the surrounding areas.” This disregard, Hoopes feels, has hurt our understanding of the region, which he believes “holds the key in tying together the Americas,” because it occupies the frontier between Mesoamerica and Lower Central and South America.

Another reason for this neglect is that the jungle-choked mounds in Mosquitia are, at first glance, not nearly as sexy as the cut-stone temples of the Maya or the intricate gold artwork of the Muisca. The people of Mosquitia, even though they left behind impressive stone sculptures, did not erect great buildings or monuments in stone, the kind of structures that become dramatic ruins wowing people five centuries in the future. Instead, they constructed their pyramids, temples, and public buildings out of river cobbles, adobe, wattle and daub, and probably tropical hardwoods. They had gorgeous woods at their disposal such as mahogany, purple rosewood, aromatic cedar, and sweet gum. We have reasons to believe their weaving and fiber technology was truly spectacular. Imagine a temple made out of highly polished tropical hardwoods, with adobe walls that had been skillfully plastered, painted, incised, and decorated, the interiors draped in richly woven and colored textiles. Such temples might well have been just as magnificent as those of the Maya. But once abandoned, they dissolved in the rain and rotted away, leaving behind unimpressive mounds of dirt and rubble that were quickly swallowed by vegetation. In the acidic rainforest soils, no organic remains survive—not even the bones of the dead.