cover image Jungle of Stone: The True Story of Two Men, Their Extraordinary Journey, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya

Jungle of Stone: The True Story of Two Men, Their Extraordinary Journey, and the Discovery of the Lost Civilization of the Maya

William Carlsen. Morrow, $28.99 (464p) ISBN 978-0-06-240739-9

Journalist Carlsen travels through Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, tracing the footsteps of Frederick Catherwood and John Lloyd Stephens, the amateur archaeologists whose 1839 expedition offered Euro-Americans their earliest awareness of Mayan civilization. At the time, the cultural and religious chauvinism of whites on both sides of the Atlantic encouraged the view that indigenous Americans had been nothing more than “primitive, inferior people.” But Stephens and Catherwood’s journey, as described through their pivotal writings, provided irrefutable evidence the Maya had created “one of the most sophisticated early civilizations on earth” and forced their readers to rethink basic assumptions about race, culture, and evolution. Carlsen depicts the two men’s arduous expedition with verve and vigor, though some readers may find that the book’s staccato narrative structure doesn’t do the material justice. The book would also have been strengthened by at least a brief engagement with the longer history of European encounters with Central America; Hernán Cortés and his conquistadors had been dazzled by Aztec culture early in the 16th century, so at least some Europeans were aware that indigenous Central Americans were not savages. Nonetheless, Carlsen finely explicates the challenges of the Catherwood-Stephens expedition and the wonders they found. Agent: Geri Thoma, Writers House. (Apr.)