Steve Elkins | |
|---|---|
 Steve Elkins in Honduras, 2012 | |
| Born | March 27, 1951 |
| Occupation | Cinematographer/Explorer |
| Known for | LIDAR and Lost City project in Mosquitia |
Steve Elkins (born March 27, 1951) is an American cinematographer and explorer.
Steve Elkins | |
|---|---|
| Steve Elkins in Honduras, 2012 | |
| Born | March 27, 1951 |
| Occupation | Cinematographer/Explorer |
| Known for | LIDAR and Lost City project in Mosquitia |
Steve Elkins (born March 27, 1951) is an American cinematographer and explorer.
Steve Elkins started his professional career as the director of an outdoor and environmental education program for the Van Gorder-Walden School in Chicago. During this time, he also worked as a field researcher for paleo-climate studies at the University of Wisconsin. While attending the Southern Illinois University and receiving a B.S in Earth Science, he conducted an archeological survey and test excavation of a rock shelter site he discovered.
Moving to California in 1979, Elkins first worked in petroleum engineering before deciding to pursue his growing interest in cinematography.
Working in the TV and film industry for over 30 years, Elkins earned numerous industry awards. In 1985, he received a gold medal at the International Film and TV festival of New York (now the New York Festival) . He received CINE Golden Eagle awards in 1987 and 1999 for originality and excellence in storytelling in the media. In 1992 Elkins won an Emmy [1] at the 44th annual Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards in the category "Camera crew - non-news" for his work on the program Drug Watch L.A. He won the California Tourism Award for Best Video in 1999 awarded by the California Travel Association for best video promoting tourism in California. He later received a Telly Award in 2003 for creative excellence. Elkins's desire to incorporate his scientific interests with media production allowed him to film around the world on a great variety of programs with science related themes.
In 1994, while researching ideas for a production and subsequently filming in the Mosquitia region of Honduras, he became fascinated with the lost city legends pervasive to the area. It became a personal quest to prove or disprove the validity of these legends which led him on a more than twenty three-year journey. Elkins is a Fellow in the Explorers Club and the Chair Person of their Southern California Chapter. [2]
After reading about the success of airborne lidar as a tool to map archaeological ruins in jungle terrain he formed a partnership with Bill Benenson in 2012 and created a company (UTL..Under The Lidar) to explore the Mosquitia jungle with lidar and produce a documentary about the experience. [3] The results included the discovery of two significant and undocumented archaeological sites [4] which were in the area purported to contain a legendary lost city.
Elkins and Benenson [5] were selected as two of Foreign Policy Magazine's Leading Global Thinkers of the Year [6] for proving airborne lidar could successfully be used as a tool of discovery and exploration in extremely thick jungle canopy. Their project was featured in the May 2013 issue of The New Yorker magazine titled, "The Eldorado Machine."
Elkins was the project leader of a 2015 ground expedition to verify the sites discovered in 2012. He assembled a multi-disciplinary scientific team to glean as much information as possible from the expedition. The results created headlines across the globe including an article in the October 2015 issue of National Geographic ("Lure of the Lost City") and an October 2015 episode of National Geographic Explorer ("Legend of the Monkey God)".
Both missions were done with the participation of the Honduran government (under two separate administrations) which initiated further archaeological excavation and survey. [7] In addition, the project highlighted the problem of illegal deforestation which the current President has been working to mitigate. President Juan Orlando Hernández along with other officials, including the Minister of Science and Technology, visited the site accompanied by Elkins.
Author Douglas Preston accompanied the 2015 expedition to Honduras and wrote a non-fiction book about the lost city project entitled The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story published by Grand Central (subsidiary of Hachette) in January 2017. [8] A CBS Sunday Morning television segment featured Preston and the Elkins expedition. [9] More recently, Elkins presented a TEDx talk on his expedition to the Lost City. [10] A children's book entitled Secrets of the Lost City by Sandra Markle describing the expedition and its discoveries has also been published. [11]
In recognition of his work with the Lost City, he was awarded The 2021 Explorers Club Citation of Merit. [12]
Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges was an English adventurer, traveller and writer.
La Mosquitia is the easternmost part of Honduras along the Mosquito Coast, which extends into northeastern Nicaragua. It is a region of tropical rainforest, pine savannah, and marsh that is accessible primarily by water and air. Its population includes indigenous and ethnic groups such as the Tawahka, Miskito, Pech, Rama, Sumo, Garífuna, Ladino, and Creole peoples. La Mosquitia has the largest wilderness area in Central America, consisting of mangrove swamps, lagoons, rivers, savannas, and tropical rain forests. The Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage site, is a part of La Mosquitia.
Douglas Jerome Preston is an American journalist and author. Although he is best known for his thrillers in collaboration with Lincoln Child, he has also written six solo novels, including the Wyman Ford series and a novel entitled Jennie, which was made into a movie by Disney. He has authored a half-dozen nonfiction books on science and exploration and writes occasionally for The New Yorker, Smithsonian, and other magazines.
Paititi is a legendary Inca lost city or utopian rich land. It allegedly lies east of the Andes, hidden somewhere within the remote rainforests of southeast Peru, northern Bolivia or northwest Brazil. The Paititi legend in Peru revolves around the story of the culture-hero Inkarri, who, after he had founded Q'ero and Cusco, retreated toward the jungles of Pantiacolla to live out the rest of his days in his refuge city of Paititi. Other versions of the legend see Paititi as an Inca refuge in the border area between Bolivia and Brazil.
Douglas Eugene "Gene" Savoy was an American explorer, author, religious leader, and theologian. He served as Head Bishop of the International Community of Christ, Church of the Second Advent from 1971 until his death. Rising to prominence as one of the premier explorers of Peru in the 1960s, he is best known for his claims to have discovered more than 40 lost cities in Peru and is credited with bringing to light a number of Peru’s most important archeological sites, including Vilcabamba, the last refuge of the Incas during the Spanish conquest, and Gran Pajaten, which he named but did not discover.
David Louis Mearns,, is an American-born United Kingdom based marine scientist and oceanographer, who specializes in deep water search and recovery operations, and the discovery of the location of historic shipwrecks.
Richard Wiese is an American explorer, the longest serving President of The Explorers Club, and Executive Producer and Host of the multiple Emmy Award-winning ABC and PBS program, Born to Explore.
Chactún is the name of an archaeological site of the Mesoamerican Maya civilization in the state of Campeche, Mexico, in the northern part of the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. The site of approximately 54 acres (22 ha) is located in the lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula, between the regions of Rio Bec and Chenes. There are some significant differences that have yet to be explained completely, which distinguish it from some of the other nearby sites.
Atlantis of the Sands refers to a legendary lost place in the southern deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, known as Ūbār/Awbār (أوبار) or Wabār/Wubār (وبار) in Arabic, thought to have been destroyed by a natural disaster or as a punishment by God.
Arlen F. Chase is a Mesoamerican archaeologist and a faculty member in the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. Previously, he was a professor in the anthropology department at Pomona College, Claremont, CA and before that the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He previously served a variety of administrative roles at the University of Central Florida over the course of his 32 year stay at that institution. He is noted for his long-term research at the ancient Maya city of Caracol, Belize and for exploring landscape traces of Maya civilization using lidar.
La Ciudad Blanca is a legendary settlement said to be located in the Mosquitia region of the Gracias a Dios Department in eastern Honduras. It is also known by the Pech name Kahã Kamasa. This extensive area of rainforest, which includes the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve, has long been the subject of multidisciplinary research. Archaeologists refer to it as being a part of the Isthmo-Colombian Area of the Americas, one in which the predominant indigenous languages have included those in the Chibchan and Misumalpan families. Due to the many variants of the story in the region, most professional archaeologists doubt that it refers to any one actual settlement, much less one representing a city of the Pre-Columbian era. They point out that there are multiple large archaeological sites in the region and that references to the legendary White City cannot be proven to refer to any single place.
Theodore A. Morde was an adventurer, explorer, diplomat, spy, journalist, and television news producer best known for his unverified claim of discovering the "Lost City of the Monkey God."
Mahendraparvata is an ancient city of the Khmer Empire era in Cambodia. The existence of the city has been known for decades, but much of it lay concealed by forest and earth. The city was uncovered by an archaeological expedition led by Jean-Baptiste Chevance and Damian Evans in 2012 with the aid of airborne laser scanning technology called LIDAR.
Joseph Rosendo is an American travel journalist, broadcaster, television personality and public speaker. Since 2007 he has been the executive producer, host, director and writer of the American Public Television series Joseph Rosendo’s Travelscope which has aired on PBS and Public Television Stations in the United States and Canada with 117 episodes in distribution. Season 10 was released in the spring of 2018 and Season 11 followed in August, 2019.
Yosseph "Yossi" Ghinsberg is an Israeli adventurer, author, entrepreneur, humanitarian, and motivational speaker, now based in Byron Bay, Australia. Ghinsberg is most known for his survival story in an uncharted part of the Bolivian Amazon jungle for three weeks in 1981. Ghinsberg's survival story was enacted in the 2017 psychological thriller Jungle, starring Daniel Radcliffe as Yossi Ghinsberg. Ghinsberg's story was also featured in the documentary series I Shouldn't Be Alive on Discovery Channel.
The Middle American Research Institute was established at Tulane University in 1924.
Target One, also called T1, is an ancient Mesoamerican city described by author Douglas Preston as located in the mountains of the Mosquitia region in the easternmost part of the modern state of Honduras. T1 is of particular archaeological significance because unlike any other Mesoamerican city ever recorded, T1, once abandoned, was not rediscovered by either local inhabitants nor expeditionary European explorers/ conquistadors until 2013 when it was finally revealed using LIDAR technology under purely speculative premises.
The Spanish conquest of Nicaragua was the campaign undertaken by the Spanish conquistadores and their Tlaxcaltec allies against the natives of the territory now incorporated into the modern Central American republic of Nicaragua during the colonisation of the Americas. Before European contact in the early 16th century, Nicaragua was inhabited by a number of indigenous peoples. The west was inhabited by Mesoamerican groups such as the Nicarao, the Chorotega, and the Subtiaba. The Nicarao are a Nahua people closely related to the Mexica of Mexico. The Chorotega and the Subtiaba are closely related to the Zapotecs and Mixtecs of Oaxaca, Mexico due to their shared Otomanguean ethnicity. Other groups included the Matagalpa and the Tacacho, both of which mainly inhabited central Nicaragua.
The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story is a 2017 nonfiction book by Douglas Preston. It is about a project headed by documentary filmmakers Steve Elkins and Bill Benenson that used LiDAR to search for archaeological sites in the Río Plátano Biosphere Reserve of the Gracias a Dios Department in the Mosquitia region of eastern Honduras. The expedition was a joint Honduran-American multidisciplinary effort involving Honduran and American archaeologists, anthropologists, engineers, geologists, biologists and ethnobotanists.
Valeriana is a Maya archaeological site in the Mexican state of Campeche in the tropical rainforest jungle near its eastern border with the state of Quintana Roo. Its discovery was announced in October 2024, and the site was named after an adjacent lake.