BELIZE CITY (AP) — A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize's
largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed
rock for a road-building project, authorities announced on Monday.
The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the
destruction at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize was detected late
last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2,300 years and is
the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico.
"It's a feeling of Incredible
disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity ... they were
using this for road fill," Awe said. "It's like being punched in the
stomach, it's just so horrendous."
Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field, and
lacked the even stone sides frequently seen in reconstructed or
better-preserved pyramids. But Awe said the builders could not possibly
have mistaken the pyramid mound, which is about 100 feet tall, for a
natural hill because the ruins were well-known and the landscape there
is naturally flat."These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It's just bloody laziness", Awe said.
Photos from the scene showed
backhoes clawing away at the pyramid's sloping sides, leaving an
isolated core of limestone cobbles at the center, with what appears to
be a narrow Mayan chamber dangling above one clawed-out section.
"Just to realize that the ancient
Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings,
using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried
this material on their heads, using tump lines," said Awe. "To think
that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a
quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that
and completely destroyed this building. Why can't these people just go
and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It's
mind-boggling."
Belizean police said they are
conducting an investigation and criminal charges are possible. The
Nohmul complex sits on private land, but Belizean law says that any
pre-Hispanic ruins are under government protection.
The Belize community-action group Citizens Organized for Liberty
Through Action called the destruction of the archaeological site "an
obscene example of disrespect for the environment and history."
It is not the first time it's
happened in Belize, a country of about 350,000 people that is largely
covered in jungle and dotted with hundreds of Mayan ruin sites, though
few as large as Nohmul.
Norman Hammond, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Boston
University who worked in Belizean research projects in the 1980s, wrote
in an email that "bulldozing Maya mounds for road fill is an endemic
problem in Belize (the whole of the San Estevan center has gone, both of
the major pyramids at Louisville, other structures at Nohmul, many
smaller sites), but this sounds like the biggest yet."Arlen Chase, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida, said, "Archaeologists are disturbed when such things occur, but there is only a very limited infrastructure in Belize that can be applied to cultural heritage management."
"Unfortunately, they (destruction
of sites) are all too common, but not usually in the center of a large
Maya site," Chase wrote.
He said there had probably still
been much to learn from the site. "A great deal of archaeology was
undertaken at Nohmul in the '70s and '80s, but this only sampled a small
part of this large center."
Belize isn't the only place where the handiwork of the far-flung and
enormously prolific Maya builders is being destroyed. The ancient Mayas
spread across southeastern Mexico and through Guatemala, Honduras and
Belize."I don't think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived," wrote Francisco Estrada-Belli, a professor at Tulane University's Anthropology Department.
"Unfortunately, this destruction
of our heritage is irreversible but many don't take it seriously," he
added. "The only way to stop it is by showing that it is a major crime
and people can and will go to jail for it."
Robert Rosenswig, an
archaeologist at the State University of New York at Albany, described
the difficult and heartbreaking work of trying to salvage information at
the nearby site of San Estevan following similar destruction around
2005.
"Bulldozing damage at San Estevan is extensive and the site is
littered with Classic period potsherds," he wrote in an academic paper
describing the scene. "We spent a number of days at the beginning of the
2005 season trying to figure out the extent of the damage .... after
scratching our heads for many days, a bulldozer showed up and we
realized that what appear to be mounds, when overgrown with chest-high
vegetation, are actually recently bulldozed garbage piles."However small the compensation, bulldozing pyramids is one very brutal way of revealing the inner cores of the structures, which were often built up in periodic stages of construction.
"The one advantage of this
massive destruction, to the core site, is that the remains of early
domestic activity are now visible on the surface," Rosenswig wrote. LINK
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