A construction company has destroyed one of the largest Mayan pyramids in Belize with bulldozers and diggers in order to excavate crushed rock for a road-building project.
The Guardian reports that Jaime Awe, the head of the Belize Institute of Archeology, announced on Tuesday that the 2,300-year-old Nohmul Complex in northern Belize has been destructed. The complex, according to Awe, could not have been mistaken to be anything else since it is about 100 feet tall.
"It's a feeling of incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity ... they were using this for road fill," said Awe to The Guardian. "It's like being punched in the stomach, it's just so horrendous."
"These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It's just bloody laziness," Awe added.
According to Past Horizons, the Nohmul complex was a major Mayan ceremonial center containing ten plazas that were connected by a raised causeway (a sacbe), a ball court, and other plazas and temples. The Yucatán type structure was built in the Classic period and boasts views of the Hondo River.
"The site was first recorded in 1897 by Thomas Gann," writes the National Institute of Culture and History (NICH). "In 1908 and 1909 Gann returned to the site to dig what he thought were burial mounds containing polychrome vessels and human effigy figures."
"Gann continued excavating up to 1936 uncovering tombs and caches which yielded human bones, jade jewelry, shells, polychrome vessels, chultuns, flint and obsidian," adds the NICH. "Most of these finds were taken to the British Museum. Later on A. H. Anderson and H.J. Cook visited Nohmul to inspect damages to the site. In 1973, 74, and 78, Norman Hammond (then with Cambridge University) mapped the site. Hammond returned in 1982 to do a more intensive Nohmul Project which lasted until 1986."
The authorities in Belize have reported that they are conducting an investigation and it is likely that criminal charges will be pressed, as the pre-Hispanic ruins are protected by the government.
"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," Awe said. "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."
Unfortunately, this is not the first time something like this has happened in Belize. Norman Hammond, an emeritus professor of archeology at Boston University, told The Guardian via email that "bulldozing Maya mounds for road fill is an endemic problem in Belize (the whole of the San Estevan centre 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, the chairman of the department of anthropology at the University of Central Florida, reveals that there was probably a great yet to be learned from the destroyed complex.
"Archeologists are disturbed when such things occur, but there is only a very limited infrastructure in Belize that can be applied to cultural heritage management," shared Chase, to The Guardian. "Unfortunately, they [destruction of sites] are all too common, but not usually in the centre of a large Maya site."
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