Out With the Old, Unfortunately

The "most important [archeological] site in northern Belize" was destroyed last week... to harvest the rocks for road-building.

Unfortunately, this isn't the first time that sometime like this has happened in Belize. The area is dotted with hundreds of similarly important ancient ruins, and it lacks the infrastructure needs to maintain all of these sites effectively.

This particular site -- known as "the Nohmul complex" -- was in the middle of a privately owned field. However, local law dictates that pre-Hispanic ruins are governmental property. 

Jamie Awe, head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, makes a very interesting point:

"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.''

Think about that. It took them years -- maybe even decades -- to build this site, and all that are like it. It took hundreds of workers thousands of hours to acquire the materials and pack them together by hand to create these historically, culturally, and, more than likely, religiously important structures. Lives were probably lost in the construction, and families probably saw life and death pass by while the walls steadily rose higher and higher.  

And then, within hours, machines came in and most of the outer walls were reduced to brick and rubble. For a road.

I know there's a quote about the cost of progress, but I'm too lazy to find it. 

But, as with most depressing stories, someone has a bright side: 

"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.

Let's hope that some beneficial discovery comes out of this.

-JJ