New York Times Bestseller (Expeditions) * THE "MASTERFUL
CHRONICLE"* OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE LEGENDARY LOST CIVILIZATION OF
THE MAYA--AN "ADVENTURE TALE THAT MAKES INDIANA JONES LOOK TAME"*
In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried
within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the
world's most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American
diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick
Catherwood-both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt,
the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome-sailed together out of New York
Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of
present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would
upend the West's understanding of human history. In the tradition
of Lost City of Z and In the Kingdom of Ice, former San Francisco
Chronicle journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist William Carlsen
reveals the remarkable story of the discovery of the ancient Maya.
Enduring disease, war, and the torments of nature and terrain,
Stephens and Catherwood meticulously uncovered and documented the
remains of an astonishing civilization that had flourished in the
Americas at the same time as classic Greece and Rome-and had been
its rival in art, architecture, and power. Their masterful book
about the experience, written by Stephens and illustrated by
Catherwood, became a sensation, hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as
"perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published" and
recognized today as the birth of American archaeology. Most
important, Stephens and Catherwood were the first to grasp the
significance of the Maya remains, understanding that their
antiquity and sophistication overturned the West's assumptions
about the development of civilization. By the time of the flowering
of classical Greece (400 b.c.), the Maya were already constructing
pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred
years the structures took on a monumental scale that required
millions of man-hours of labor, and technical and organizational
expertise. Over the next millennium, dozens of city-states evolved,
each governed by powerful lords, some with populations larger than
any city in Europe at the time, and connected by road-like
causeways of crushed stone. The Maya developed a cohesive, unified
cosmology, an array of common gods, a creation story, and a shared
artistic and architectural vision. They created stucco and stone
monuments and bas reliefs, sculpting figures and hieroglyphs with
refined artistic skill. At their peak, an estimated ten million
people occupied the Maya's heartland on the Yucatan Peninsula, a
region where only half a million now live. And yet by the time the
Spanish reached the "New World," the Maya had all but disappeared;
they would remain a mystery for the next three hundred years.
Today, the tables are turned: the Maya are justly famous, if
sometimes misunderstood, while Stephens and Catherwood have been
nearly forgotten. Based on Carlsen's rigorous research and his own
1,500-mile journey throughout the Yucatan and Central America,
Jungle of Stone is equally a thrilling adventure narrative and a
revelatory work of history that corrects our understanding of
Stephens, Catherwood, and the Maya themselves. *Missourian *Tampa
Bay Times
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