Answers to Criticisms About the Recent Ciudad Blanca Reports Part II Ciudad blanca is Findable and Exists

Part II—Comments on The Criticisms of the Recent Ciudad Blanca Reports

Did the Ciudad de Mono Dios of Theodore Morde Exist? Is  his Work Relevant? Are the cities of Honduran indian and Ladino myths Knowable Archaeologically? Can we know if they existed historically?  

3) Another criticism of the US archaeologists is that trying to find the City of the Monkey God that Theodore Morde found is useless, as they do not believe it exists, and they do not believe the Ladino, Nahua, and Pech cities also combined in the Spanish myth Ciudad Blanca do not exist. Theodore Morde when he found what he thought was the  Ciudad Blanca (White City, a name first professionally reported by Eduard Conzemius in 1927 in his article on Payas), Morde called the city he found of the City of the Monkey God (Ciudad de Mono Dios), because of the temple he found there.

Theodore Morde's Collection of Ciudad Blanca artifacts in NMAI in Washington DC

I am not sure why US archaeologists think Theodore Morde did not find anything as there are over 1,000 pieces of artifacts he found in the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) collection, and I believe they are filed under Chorotegas. The pottery complex in NW Honduras was previously known as the Chorotega complex, but since then some of it has been identified as Lenca, and some of it like red on buff wares like Naco Bichrome with Quetzalcoalt (snake bird motif), Fine Orange Ware,  and Tohil Plumbate are found with local variations in Toltec style tombs in El Salvador reported in William Fowler’s book on the Pipil-Nicaroa. His photographs of the site were lost when the canoe overturned, not a particularly unusual occurance in the Honduran Moskitia. Some however believe it was punishment of the jealous Gods who do not want their secret out.

Theodore Morde, who was an explorer for the Heye Foundation and not a profesional archaeologist, nevertheless wrote an extremeley interesting report, which tried to find out what were the myths behind the statues and animals he found including the monkey god,and the Margarita bird. The Margarita bird he killed is shown in the video on Youtube. The Tawahkas still dance a dance to the Margarita bird. At first the story he collected about the blonde Chorotega princess Oro who married the God Wampai, at first sounds unlikely, however, the Miskitos of nearby Wampusirpe continue as their favorite dance the Oro dance done at Christmastime.This is in spite of the fact that the Miskito language has no letter O. The correct name for Miskitos is Miskitu. The princess Oro was supposedly changed into the Margarita bird, according to a myth Morde collected.

The stories of blonde and pale skinned people including the Rah, Ce Acatl Quetzalcoatl Topiltzin, the Guabas on the Miskito coast, and the Miskito Linguist Erasmo Ordeñez saying the common name for Miskitos Waika comes from the Word Viking continue to Surface to this day in the Mosquitia. Communities with many Blondes,some with Green or blue eyes (ojos zarkos), were also reported in parts of Santa Barbara and in a community outside of Copan Ruinas in Western Honduras.

If Oro's name is pronounced in Miskito, it would be pronounced uru, similar to the Word for monkey urus, such as in Pech. Sincé he was asking for stories related to the monkey god, this story, and the story of the sisimite stealing Tawahka women were what he was told. The Jicaque story about monkeys is that there was a first generation of people who were inmortal monkeys, and eventually they went up to the sky and became stars and are laughing at us, because they are immortal and we are going to die. That is why one versión of Anne Chapman's book of Jicaque myths was called The Sons of Death. Monkeys in Nahua are called "oso" according to Terrance Kaufman. This looks like the Spanish Word oso meaning bear, but there are no bears in Honduras nor in Mexico where sisimite stories were collected in a book called The bear and his son. The word oso appears fairly frequently in animal stories in Honduras such as Uncle Rabbit stories,  even though Honduras has no bears. It also appears as oso hormiguero (bear ant) for giant anteaters. Oswaldo Munguía though the inspiration for sisimite stories was actually the hairy sloth (oso perezoso) in Honduras, which is not actually a monkey, as English speakers divide animals. Honduran Indians divide animals differently in their own languages like in Miskito since Word for bird means things that fly, bats are birds.

Queztalcoatl's death in Honduras and its relationship with the Ciudad Blanca myth is Important to Understand the Conquest of Mexico--Huehuetlapalan?

The confusión of Hernan Cortes described in Spanish as Tez clara (light skinned), rubio (fair haired), alto (tall) and barbudo (bearded) and the same description for the Toltec King Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl who according to Honduran Ladinos  and Aztec myths collected by Fray Sahagun in Mexico died in the Ciudad blanca (huehuetlapalan or tlapalan, old city of red earth in Nahua) located a few days journey east of where Hernan Cortes and his Nahua-Maya Translator la Malinche were in Trujillo and then they went back to Veracruz and the Aztec capital of Tenochitlan, now Mexico City, may have played a role in why Cortes was able to conquer the Aztecs. So the argument that the city which is the origin of the Ladino myths about the Ciudad Blanca never existed and thus we can not know it archaeologically, seem totally untrue, as Cortes heard of it from eyewitnesses in Trujillo in 1524 while it was still inhabitted and while he had a Nahua translator.

Ciudad Blanca as a City of Great Wealth or Gold--Taguzgalpa

The other city with a Nahua name associated with the Ciudad blanca myth of the Spanish is Taguzcalpa (the house where gold was melted) which was probably located in the department of Colon. This is where the Princess said in the 1540’s to Bishop Christobal Pedraza the people ate off of plates of gold, but they had all been taken away and sold. This name for the province of the área east of Trujillo to about the Rio Coco, continued throughout the colonial period. Dr. William Davidson believes the same words are also the origin of the name of Honduras’s capital Tegucigalpa, which has neighbors like Calpules,and Toncontin,the drum made of a hollow log with an h shape on top, also known to the Indians of Agalteca, Yoro, the Tawahkas (who called it drum), the Mayas,and the Aztecs.

The Relationship Between name the Names of City of the Red Earth and Place where Gold is Melted

There is a relationship between red earth and gold,as according to Pastor Gomez, the autor of Placer gold Mining, African Slaves and Interethnic Relationships in Honduras in the 16th century, there was a special kind of red clay, high in arguilite, that was found in neither Mexico nor in Guatemala, that was needed to build the furnaces to melt the gold to be able to determine how many carats it is (quilatear), but it was found in Honduras. Apparantly this type of clay was quite rare.

Can this “Discovering” of the Ciudad Blanca lead to the Destruction of a Sacred Site?

4) If the new site found by the National Geographic team has not been looted and was left alone and full of unafraid monkeys, it is probably because they found a sacred site, and the local Indians are going to be very upset if in fact the Honduran state tries to take it away, dig it up, and prohibit ceremonial uses of the área.

Where the Pech city of Kao Kamasa (White House), the Pech versión of the Ciudad Blanca, where the Pech hero Patakako died or disappeared or was sacrificed to the gods by the inhabitants of the Ciudad Blanca, has been able to be identified by looking at Pech myths and place names, but its location has not been revealed publically because the área is sacred to the Pech and to the Tawahkas, and The place names in the área where the Pech say their hero died are in Nahua, and would have had special signficance to the Nicarao Nahua speakers related to a visión of their priests while they were in Tehuantepec in southern Mexico.

One of the places the Nicarao stopped before moving up to the North Coast of Honduras and south into Nicaragua was Izalco (place of obsidean) in El Salvador. Most of the myths or oral history being identified as Pipil currently being in El Salvador is being done among the Nahuaizalco Indians who still make carrizo baskets and tule mats. You can find the making of tule mats (petates), the hallmark of tultecas or toltecas (people of tule or the land of tule) in archaeological finds, as there is a bone tool used to weave them, like the one in the San Pedro Sula Museum.

Why is Kao Kamasa (The White City story of the Pech Indians) Considered Sacred?

When Theodore Morde got near a sacred site, the Tawahka Indians who had been accompanying him disappeared. The Pech believe one must be pure to enter, to have permission of the spirits, and so generally only the Watá or shaman could go, and even he prepared himself to go. This desecration and privitization of sacred sites has already been the case of other Honduran Indian sacred sites like Copan Ruinas where until the park was closed off in the 1940’s was still used by the Maya Chorti for ceremonies report locals. The case of Taulabé caves near Lake Yojoa (called by the Lencas Lake Taulepa Cave of the Jaguar in Lenca where the Lencas from all over Western Honduras and parts of El Salvador did their rain ceremony into the 1950’s has been outrageous. Recently the Poza de la Sirena and la Piedra del Duende, which probably owe their Spanish names to older Nahua ceremonial uses have been privatized in the Trujillo and Santa Fe areas. Dr. Lazaro Flores's first book of Pech myths was subtitled Los Guardianes de los Patatahua (the Guardians of the Patatahua). Pata means ours and tahua means ancestors in Pech. So as the burial ground of our ancestors, the Pech and the Tawahkas have at least until now considered it sacred.

The Right of Discovery, as the basis of Colonialism, and Neocolonism

 So if Dr. Rosemary Joyce and others are complaining of neocolonialism, this is because the Right of Discovery, I found it, it is mine, is still active in law in the US, Canada, and somewhat in Honduras,  and it is the legal basis of colonialism, and in the case of the Ciudad Blanca means the site is likely to take away from the local Indians that have cared for it forever as a holy site and desecrate it in the name of archaeology and science. Western science for many centuries also gave supremacy to Europeans’ knowledge and their right to things, and lands over the local peoples’s rights, and sometimes was used to control and sell the local peoples themselves. This latter issue affects why there are so few of the original Indians who built the ciudad blanca and the Trujillo and Bay Islander sites.

Theodore Morde's Descriptions of City of the Monkey God Matches What is Known of the Religious Beliefs , Architecture, and Art of the Possible Builders of sites in the Ciudad blanca área--The Toltecs-- and may explain the name of Wampu or Guampu river and Wampusirpe Community in the Honduran Moskitia

Theodore Morde’s report is very interesting in that he describes a city of columns for the God Wampai, very similar to the Toltec style temple of the Warriors in Chichen Itza, which is shown in the video Search for Ciudad blanca which is available in Parts I-IV in English and Spanish verion all in one part on Youtube. The name Wampai did not strike a bell with any of the Pech, Miskito and Tawahka Indians I spoke to, and the name of the river Wampu where large ruins like la Llorona are located, also no meaning has been found in these languages. It does not have the form of a Chorotega Word. I believe the river Wampu or Guampu is named for this God, as is the Miskito city Wampusirpe (little guampu or Wampai), and the Miskitos changed the ai sound to u, because their language only has three vowels, and none of them have ai sound.

The temple of the Monkey god that Theodore Morde reported includes a double balastrade on the stairs going up the Temple. This type of doublé balastrade is a known aspect of Toltec architecture. On one balastrade there was a crocodile. Among Nahua speakers,the crocodile was the earth monster, that was converted into the earth for people to build on. As noted above, I believe the Monkey god is the son of the sisimite with a human woman, Nahuehue. Sisimite stories are still told by the Ladinos (sisimite), by the Miskitos (kisi, from nkisi nature spirit in Bantu languages), Tawahkas (Uhlak), and the Pech (Takaskro).  Xiximite was also a  personal name used by pre-Columbian Pipil Kings in Cuscatlán, El Salvador.

Many Statues and Carvings Exist of the Monkey god in NE Honduras, and in place names in NW Honduras

In the Trujillo Museum there was a stone carved statue of a god with a monkey face, but a nice robe, and a hat. In fact he looked a lot like the Monkey god Great saint equal to heaven of Chinese legends like The Journey to the West. He was about 8 inches high, similar in size to the statues of chiefs in that Museum. The statues and the polychromed plates show the chiefs with a kidney shield, a style introduced by the Toltecs according to Michael Coe, and it does not show them wearing the tilma, the cloth kind of draped over one shoulder that is present in most Aztec drawings in Codices. It would appear that they were Nahua speakers, but not Aztecs,which matches most of the nearby place names. The special favorite god of Ce Acatl Topoltzin Quetzalcoatl was Quetzalcoatl,and Quetzalcoatl remains in the many statues, metate heads, and the place name Papayeca from his high priest Papa. These are shown in museums and in the field (literally, there is corn groing aroungd it) in the video Search for Ciudad Blanca on Youtube.  Monkey faces were carved into stones including on the Rio Platano and as shown in the video Search for Ciudad blanca. Naco as a place name in Western Honduras refers to this god. It thus would not be surprising to find a monkey god temple in Ciudad Blanca área. According to the Pech Indians, there are also monkey skulls in the wáter of the Rio Platano near Walpatara (Painted Rock, but it is actually carved). The Pech, Miskito, and Tawahkas are all known to eat roasted monkey, and the Pech have told me it is delicious, although the Garífunas complain it is tough meat. Maybe they do not know how to cook it well, or it might be an adquired taste. 

Were the Builders of the Stone Carved ruins in Ciudad blanca área hierarchically Organized Societies? Did they form States?

5. One objection to saying that this área was Mesoamerican was these archaeologists, some of whom do not study NE Honduras,  argued that the Indians in the  Ciudad Blanca área had no chiefs, and a non hierarchical society. The Spanish reported slaves, macehuales (vassals,common people), principales (leaders), chiefs (caciques) and el verdero señor (the true lord) on the political side and priests and a chief preist (papa) on the religious side. It may be that these arqueologists and anthropologists are confusing the local Pech Indians who do have  a nonhierarchical society with historical reports of Payas. Not all Indians reported as Payas in the colonial documents were Pech nor were all of them rainforest tropical forest type hunter-gatherer-fisher, root crop grower type peoples. Besides myself, Dr. Robert Carmack identifies the Indians in the Trujillo-Lower Aguan área as Nahua spekaers, and Dr. Linda Newson and Anne Chapman noticed Mexican Indian colonies in the Trujillo area.

NE Honduras is incredibly well known for the Contact área as who was who in the Spanish conquest of the New World—Christopher Columbus, Hernan Cortes, La Malinche, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Gomara, were all in NE Honduras or had NE Honduras under their jurisdiction, and Bartolomé de las Casas’s writings in defense of the miserable treatment of Indians that led to their death was largely based on his experiences of working with Honduran Indians either in Honduras or when they were exported to the Indies to work in the mines. Of the thousands of Honduran Indians, especially of the Nahua speaking groups, exported to the Indies prior to the publication of the New Laws in 1845, only 11 were still alive in 1845, and they were not sent home. So many Nahuas were sent to work in the conquest of Peru, that according to the SEDINAFROH website in Honduras, they are still there and have organized as Nahuas in Peru.

Northeastern Honduras was organized into Complex States at the Time of Conquest

The Trujillo and Lower Aguan área were organized in states with subject towns below them, and subject villages (parajes) below that, and the two main states Papayeca and Champagua (the river is now called Chapagua and the archaeology of both these and Betulia in Santa Fe are in the Trujillo museum) were organized in alliance with each other, similar to the Triple Alliance of the Aztecs in the Valley of Mexico, with Papayeca and its señor or Lord being the chief of all these places. The size of these states was larger than say Luxembourg in Europe.

Maybe Toltec Nahua speakers Organized a Huge multiethnic Conferation of States--Payaquí (among Nahoas), with the capital possibly being Esquipulas, Guatemala

These states also seemed to have been in a loose Alliance or confederation with the other Nahua dominated states to which the names Payaquí (among Nahuas) or Hueytlato (el mayor, the big one), may refer to, and all these states in Naco, Santa Barbara, the Trujillo-Lower Aguan-Olancho área, the Comayagua área, and the state in the Lenca área of Intibuca Lempira, Ocotepeque  paid tribute to the Maya-Chorti chief Copan Galel, as captain of the Toltecs of Equipulas, Guatemala. See the Wikipedia in Spanish article historia de El Salvador for a map of where all the Indian provinces in Central America were at the time of Conquest.

The Indians who revolted against the Spanish under Copan Galel seemed to have included Maya Chortis, Lencas, and some Nahuas, but the big towns with Nahua names Equipulas (Esquipul, Panther who devours human hears the Nicarao equivalent of Techalipochtla Smoking Mirror) and Chiquimuljá (the place of the Jilquero bird) did not join his revolt.  The founding story of the founding of Chiquimula on the oficial city website Chiquimula Online which also includes Palenque, Culhuacan, and Tula.  

La Malinche, Hernan Cortes’s Mayan Nahua translator is still remembered in dance theater among the Chortis of Jocotan, Guatemala and the Indians of Mejicapa, Lempira, Honduras, even though she did not go to either place. Although some historians do not believe that Payaquí existed even though it is in the colonial era book Isoque, there is a letter from Capitan Rojas directly at the time of the Spanish conquest that he went through Payaqui and Hueyatlato on his way from the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua through Olancho to Trujillo, where he met with Hernan Cortes. This document is produced in its entierity in the three volume book La Historia del Puerto de Trujillo. Because La Malinche spoke Maya and Nahuatl it appears whatever she said at the time of her 1524 visit to the Nahua speaking states of NE and NW Honduras made a lasting impression on the Indians both in Honduras and Guatemala, and in the Aztec capital of Tenochitlan. As in other Central American countries, La Llorona (the female spirit who cries over her children) is sometimes thought to be La Malinche herself, and her troubledness over the her relationship with Hernan Cortes who eventually took a Spanish wife and her mixed race children. People in the Trujillo still report hearing La Llorona in their houses, and a Salvadoran had to tell them how to get her to go away.

Other Examples of Monkeys in the Ciudad Blanca Area besides Morde's City of the Monkey God

On the Rio Platano (Rio Waraská in Pech) where the Ciudad Blanca is supposedly located, monkey faces are often carved in Stone. Some have been reported directly beside the Rio Platano by Oswaldo Munguia of MOPAWI, the environmental protection agency for the Rio Platano Biosphere. The same type of carved monkey faces with big ears were also found at the site being excavated by huaqueros or looters in the video Search for Ciudad blanca  on youtube.     This type of carved monkey face in Stone was also reported on the Paulaya River, and then the granite Stone was cut off at the base and stolen, also according to Ladinos in the área, the fate of the Monkey statue Theodore saw. Some Stone carvings in Honduras are only visible at canoe level from the river.   The video Search for Ciudad Blanca shows pretty clearly a figure of a man with a Crown carved into the rock near that spot. How can US archaeologists argue for non-hierarchical societies in the face of chief statues and kings carved in Stone, and ethnohistorical descriptions of kings in Spanish documents and oral history?

Morning Star stories as Kings and as God of the Hunt, and Creator of the Jaguar bone Flute

In La Moskitia desde Adentro, Miskito Scott Wood noted the names of known Miskito kings before the line of Miskito kings with English names started around 1640. This is the second report of a King named Morning Star among the Miskitos I have seen, the other being in Gotz von Houwald’s book Mayagna. Maybe the birth of Morning Star who rose to unite all of the Mosquitia and made them pay tribute, is why some people think Quetzalcoatl (who became the Morning star) was born in the Ciudad blanca. It may also refer to the fact that when Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl died in the Ciudad Blanca, he became either a hummingbird (colibrí), or sea foam, or the morning star. The Pech  myth of the origin of the jaguar bone flute (often called flauta azteca in the archaeological literatura) also talks about how both the morning star and the evening star changed from people to stars after they chased and killed the jaguar. This story of the morning star as God of the Hunt killing the jaguar is shown in an Aztec Codex, too. The path between Santa Fe Colon and the archaeological sites in Aguan Valley like Papayeca and Cuyamel Caves is still called Sendero colobrí the Hummingbird path, even though the bird hummingbird is called gorrión by most Hondurans.

Other examples of What the National Geographic team found in NE Honduras

In general the photos and descriptions of the archaeology found in the recent team sent by National Geographic to the Ciudad Blanca área which created the recent news sensation is the same archaeology found in the Search for Ciudad Blanca video—metates (corn grinding stones) with animal heads like vulture and crocodiles and Quetzalcoatl heads, and they can also be seen in the Trujillo Rufino Galan Museum, which has been open over 50 years.

Toltecs as Master Stone Carvers and the Stone Ruins and Carvings in the Ciudad Blanca area

Mexican authors writing about Tula/Teotihuacan before the arrival of the Aztecs note that the real forté of the builders of Teotihuacan where the principal gods included Quetzalcoatl and the Goddess of Terrestial Waters was their amazing Stone carving ability. In The Search for Ciudad Blanca, Ted Danger who has spent much of his life working in geology, notes that the rock of the things made in the Ciudad Blanca área are incredibly hard, and that the people must have been mastercrafts to have made them. Note that they have the Greek key design. This design is also found in the Cholulteca área of Honduras noted an IHAH archaeologist interviewed for El Heraldo newspaper in Tegucigalpa. Emilio Aguilar who accompanied the Sir Walter Raleigh expedition, said the source of that Stone is not where you find a lot of metates and other carved Stone artifacts.  The Mosquitia área is not mostly volcanic mountains and thus would not be a likely place for that kind of rock and if it had been worked locally, there would be pieces of broken rock that was chisled off which there is not. I have also seen some very delicate Green Stone carvings like a quetzal with its long tail curving on the side and below.

Gold in the rivers, but no Gold objects, Why All Honduran Indians may not have liked Gold

The gold in the área seems to have mostly been exported to Costa Rica or to the Mixtec área of Mexico, where it was worked into jewelry and other Golden things. Only three things of gold have been found in Honduras archaeologically and the Spanish also complained that there was little gold and all that they had confiscated as maybe being gold, turned out to be copper. The Lencas preferred White stones like marble of the famous Ulua marble vases, and Olmecs, Mayas, and Nahuas like Green Stone, but even though the Spanish eventually found a lot of gold in Honduras, most Honduran Indians seemed to think that it had bad luck, that it belonged to the devil, that one has to pay in souls of the workers to get the gold. These types of stories continue until today with the 2014 mining cave in 14 workers died, but someone dreamed the devil said he was still due 6 more souls,that the deal was for 20 souls for the mine owners to get rich. While I would guess the American and Canadian miner owners feel themselves much superior to those people sacrificing Aztecs and Pipiles, to the Honduran worker, they apparantly of the same type.

The Archaeology of NE Honduras is Already Known, why all the Hype?

6 )The fact that this type of archaeology has been reported for much of the last 50 years, including by Doris Z. Stone in her books like the Arqueología delaCosta Norte de Honduras (available in English and In Spanish) and Arqueología de Centroamerica and Dr. Chris Begley, owner of the Internet site www.mosquitia.com is part of what annoyed many US archaeologists enough to sign a letter of complaint published by the Guardian in Manchester, England.

What Could be the origin of the Spider at the City of the Monkey God of Theodore Morde?

The other balastrade at the Ciudad de Mono Dios (City of the Monkey God) supposedly found by Theodore Morde, reportedly had a spider on it. If the archaeology and legends are true that the ancestors of the Nahuas and Yaquis lived in the American Southwest and that is why there is a Naco, Arizona (see Dr. Brian Fagan’s book The Prehistory of People for information), and as well as a Naco, Santa Barbara, legends of wise grandmother spiders are still common in the US Southwest.  

 According to US linguist Jeff Pynes, who has worked with Nahuatl, Nahua, Jicaque/Tol, and Utah languages like Shoshone, legends of the sisimite continue in the other Uto-Aztecan related langauges of the Southwest and the use of tule, the wáter reed used to make petate mats in Honduras, but used by California Indians and NW American Indians for river going boats and mats for the walls of their houses, still continues to be important in these speakers.   The American archeologist who led the recent National Geographic expedition said specifically that he did not find the Ciudad de Mono Dios that Morde found.

Corn and Rain god artifacts in clay--Xipe totec, Tláloc, and Quetzalcóatl as Motifs in Postclassic

Tlaloc cups are often found together in Central America in Pipil-Toltec sites with life size clay statues of Xipe Totec, the Nahua god of Young corn. An excellent example of these life size clay statues can be seen in the Banco Atlantida next to the Hotel Honduras Maya in Tegucigalpa. That may be the example found near San Esteban, Olancho. Banco Atlantida has now put most of its beautiful archaeological collection online, so people who need to see examples of the different styles of Honduran pottery like Tohil Plumbate or Naco Bichrome (a red clay ceramic with a buff colored Paint, usually with a bird with snake fangs painted on it in red outlines) can see them there.

Naco would be the Nahua name of the city of the Monkey God, and there was one in NW Honduras

The archaeological site of Naco which is on the border of Cortes and Santa Barbara departments would meet the criteria of being a city, as it was estimated to having a population of 10,000 people, and was probably named for a Nahua Monkey God, the son of the sisimite with a human woman Nahuehue  (great or old Na). So Naco would be the place of (co) of Na (the name of the son of the sisimite) in Nahua.

There is also an archaeological ruin in Arizona in the United States called Naco, and the two Naco’s seemed to have been connected by trade through an archaeological site in Chihuahua, Mexico. Copper war bells made in Cortes Department in Honduras are found along that trade route, and New Mexico tourquoise was found in the form of a mask made of tourquoise in the Department of Cortes.In the video Search for Ciudad blanca and in the Trujillo Museum at the Fort in the Reception área, there are examples of painted clay masks used probably in some kind of mortuary situation. Thus they would probably be the same or similar Indians as used the tourquoise mask in the Dept. of Cortes.  

Before the Toltec-Chichimeca lived in the Valley of Mexico did they live in Naco, Arizona?

Arizona is also a place name in Honduras in the North Coast Department of Atlantida between Tela and La Ceiba. Before the Nahua speaking Toltecs (tultecas in colonial writings in Central America) settled in the Valley of Mexico and adopted corn agriculture, they reportedly were Chichimeca (the dog people), the Indians who lived in northern Mexico in the drier áreas. The name Chichimeca has been reported as a charácter in the Guancasco of Gracias, Lempira and Mejicapa (place of the Mexica), Lempira in Honduras.  

Chichi- appears in place names like Chichigalpa (place of the houses of the Chichimecas in Nahua), and in plant names like chichicaste, chichipate (cure or medicine of the chichimeca) in Central America. It might be that  Chichi in these cases refers to any non-Nahua speaking group like the Nahua words chontal (foreigner) and jicaques (those who were here before us, which was applied by the Spanish to any non-conquered Indian group and not just speakers of the Tol language, now only spoken on Montaña de la flor, Francisco Morazon.

The three Mejicapas in Central America—outside of Gracias, Lempira, a neighborhood of Comayagua where the prison is located, and in Usulatan, El Salvador were formed with Mexican encomienda Indians of the Conquistadors of Honduras like Pedro Alvarado and Hernan Cortes who were not sent home again to Mexico.  In the Wars following Independence from Spain, the colonial pueblo de Indio of Mejicapa, Comayagua was razed to the ground, and the colonial era pueblo de indio of San Francisco Zapota also disappeared and the Ladinos formed a new town there San Francisco de la Paz, Olancho.

Zapota may be same tree as the Nispero tree, from which tunu bark cloth is made and chicle is extracted. An ethnobotanist and a graduate student in Anthropology from the University of Washington also accompanied recent National Geographic expedition to the Ciudad Blanca area, so they might have interesting results as well. The Honduran Institute of Tourism when they inaugurated the Ruta Kao Kamasa (White House in Pech) said 80 archaeologists were working the Ciudad Blanca área. Soon we might learn some very interesting things. Zapote is still a large fruit with an orange interior and a Brown exterior in Honduras, and is very popular in Eastern Honduras.

Both the Quiche Mayas who wrote the Popol Vuh and whoever wrote the Isoque report the Mayas wearing bark cloth before they learned the secret of cotton. A piece of tunu bark cloth was found wrapped around the obsidean excentric on the cover of Atanasio Herranz’s book on Power and Language policies in Honduras. It is the only piece of cloth that has been found for the Classic Period, due to poor conditions for preserving cloth.

In Mexico amate bark paper is still made from the outside tree bark of the amate tree, and is sold with painted designs on it. Tunu cloth can also be made from the inside bark of the tunu (miskito name) or amate tree (Nahua name), In Tawahka the Word for tunu cloth is still amat. Place names in Honduras like Los Amatillos (the Little amate trees) indicate the Word Amate was also used in Honduras.  Amate bark paper was painted with magical-ceremonial designs, and as noted was previously used for making the faces of idols made of Straw (maybe tule or junco (acatl) leaves, Honduras does not grow wheat to make European type Straw) called tzkin. According to older Pech men, tunu cloth also used to be marked with magical ceremonial designs by a shaman. In 1889 out of Trujillo 1,000 pounds of tunu were exported. It is likely it was headed for Belize.

Tunu Bark Cloth, Scarlet Macaw Feathers, Medicinal Plants, Other Exchanges Across Cultural International Frontiers

So the trade in tunu bark cloth between NE Honduras in that product and the Mesoamerican área continued at least until the late 19th century. The movement of feathers of macaws for the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico who use them ceremonially continues, although partially broken down. Sincé the Tawahkas still eat the scarlet macaws, I have been interested in how to reopen that transfer legally instead of illegally smuggling the macaws, which seems to be following a trail that has been open for at least 1,000 years.  In 1860, when William Wells was in Olancho, 27 different kinds of feathers were still being offered by feather merchants at the Catacamas Fair. This kind of craft was known as plumería, and included being used for dance masks among the Lencas who now use colored paper, for headresses, including dance headresses of the Garífuna, for feathered cloaks still worn in 1860, and in the precolumbian period in NW Honduras there are statues carrying feathered square shields. (The Aztecs used round shields)  But Jesus, maria santísima, what things are travelling on that trail now between Honduras and the US Southwest--drugs, guns, women, besides live birds and medicinal plants. Tilo is a plant that only grows in the mountains of Mexico, but somehow it ends up in humble medicinal plant stalls like in Trujillo market, where it is sold for nerves.