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The True Story of Two Men, Their Extraordinary Journey, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya
William Morrow
May 2016
On Sale: April 26, 2016
544 pages
ISBN: 0062407392
EAN: 9780062407399
Kindle: B0105V62Z0
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
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 rain forests 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 2,500-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.
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