Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Case of the Missing Mayan Pyramid



It sounds like a Nancy Drew title, but in case you haven’t heard, this really happened in Belize this week. According to reports, a road building company demolished the pyramid named “Nohmul”  to use the material for filling roads. Historic and tourism communities are “outraged” by the episode, but apparently it isn’t the first time this has happened.

Imagine that you are on vacation in one of the most beautiful parts of the world. You are taking in the sites and doing your very best job pretending to be fluent in the native tongue. Suddenly while posing next to a historic landmark, bulldozers and backhoes drive up and start tearing it apart. That would be quite an experience.

The fact that they are using the remnants of the pyramid for road construction seems like something out of a bad novel or political cartoon. Could you see something like this happening in the United States? The Statue of Liberty is made of about 62,000 pounds of copper. In today’s market, that would go for a little over $225,000US and the steel would add about $30,000US to that(Valia Blogs). Wouldn’t it be crazy if some random construction contracting company scrapped the statue for its building materials without any warning or coordination?

I just thought this was an interesting story and I don’t know how it could have happened. You would think that someone who lived in an area with so many Mayan sites would have either the intelligence to know the difference between a random hill in the middle of flat landscape and a pyramid. Either that, or they would have some sort of pride in their history..

What do you guys think? Let me know in the comments section down below.

Photo from cbsnews.com

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