A 2300 Year Old Mayan Pyramid Was Destroyed For A New Road

A 2300 Year Old Mayan Pyramid Was Destroyed For A New Road

In your horrific bulldozing news of the day, a construction company found it to be a good idea to destroy one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramids just so they can use its materials for crushed rock in a road-building project. The 2300 year old pyramid survived Mother Nature but fell to idiot man. Nice.

The Nohmul pyramid, which is one of the most important sites in northern Belize (near the Mexico border), didn’t look as polished as what you imagine a pyramid to look like because it lacked “the even stone sides frequently seen in reconstructed or better-preserved pyramids”. But still, if you’re destroying something over a 100-foot tall that is clearly not man-made, you probably should ask for permission first.

Jaime Awe, head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, said:

“Just to realise 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. 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.”

Apparently it’s a common problem in Belize (the destruction of Maya sites for road fill) but no one has ever destroyed a pyramid so large before. There’s a time and place to move forward from the past but if something is still standing from 2300 years ago and you’re just using it for road fill, um, you should find something else.

[AP, Image Credit: AP]


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