Mayan Pyramid In Belize Leveled By Construction Crew 276
An anonymous reader writes "If an imposing 2300-year old Mayan temple situated at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize was on your list of things to see before you die, you're too late. The monument was essentially destroyed by a construction crew in order to provide gravel for road construction. Archaeologists expressed shock, as Nohmul (the "great mound") was a major Mayan religious center in its day. While the pyramid was situated on private property, such historical sites are supposedly protected by ordinance, and officials may file criminal charges."
Re:Well its not a good time for pyramids (Score:5, Insightful)
Your comment would likely get more credibility without the ethnic slur. Also that is a BS article as it was one nutcase that suggested it, not their government or anyone in power.
If we judged folks that way all slashdotters would be considered ill informed racists based on your comment alone.
I've been to Belize (Score:0, Insightful)
Its a GOP mecca of international commercial interests first, to hell with anything that benefits the local people. The article doesn't say who owns the private land but probably foreign. Palms got greased and goodbye pyramid. Don't cry Yankees, you did the same to your own native peoples, and worse.
Re:Fat, squat, and stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Those mestizo half-breeds really weren't born with a full box of marbles--destroying a temple for road gravel. And Obama wants to flood our country with these tawny height challenged brainiacs.
So since these half-breeds are inferiour to their ancestors who built the great temple in the first place, presumably it was the influx of Western European genes that lead to this inferiority?
Re:Well its not a good time for pyramids (Score:0, Insightful)
How credible is that you don't know what the fuck you are talking about since "Muzzies" refers to "Muslims", and last time ANYONE checked, that was a religion and NOT a fucking race.
So now you are outed as an oversensitive 'PC' slinging DIPSHIT...your comment can be summarily ignored.
Private land owner wanted to clear his land (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, the pyramid was on privately owned land. Time to check and see what the land owner wanted to do with the land that the pyramid was getting in the way of. Or, perhaps he was just concerned that all these tourists were coming to this pyramid and he wasn't getting anything out of it. And the insurance liability, Suppose someone were climbing around on this thing and fell, even if they were illegal trespassers would he be responsible? There are a number of very good legal reasons why he's want to have this hazard removed. On top of that, I understand the price of gravel is very high these days.
As much as I hate the idea of expropriating land from private owners, if you want to really preserve these sorts of things you've got to remove them from private ownership and recompense the land owner either with money or a swap of some new land of equal value. As long as these sorts of things are in private ownership, this will continue.
Re:Well its not a good time for pyramids (Score:4, Insightful)
religion != ethnicity
Re:Well its not a good time for pyramids (Score:2, Insightful)
And to all coders out there, language != country.
I'm tired of selecting "French" and having my country code set to "France" and my keyboard set to fucking "AZERTY".
Re:Private land owner wanted to clear his land (Score:5, Insightful)
As much as I hate the idea of expropriating land from private owners, if you want to really preserve these sorts of things you've got to remove them from private ownership and recompense the land owner either with money or a swap of some new land of equal value.
Or just accept that land ownership comes with certain restrictions. For example, if I want an addition to my house, I can't just build whatever I want; I need to get permits and ensure that the construction complies with building codes. Saying "no, you cannot knock down this ancient structure which was built millennia ago on what now happens to be your land" strikes me as a reasonable counterpart to that.
Re:Well its not a good time for pyramids (Score:4, Insightful)
ill informed racists
As opposed to the well-informed, who think Islam is a race?
Re:Private land owner wanted to clear his land (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as I hate the idea of expropriating land from private owners, if you want to really preserve these sorts of things you've got to remove them from private ownership and recompense the land owner either with money or a swap of some new land of equal value. As long as these sorts of things are in private ownership, this will continue.
You mean, as long as we embrace the notion of private property so that we may enable rent-seeking, this will continue. No one should have the right to simply bulldoze the past.
Re:Well its not a good time for pyramids (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you even sure it was a bad idea? They managed to take an small extremist group on the verge of collapse due to disinterest and lack of funding and give it an enemy that built it into a large and thriving terrorist network inspirational enough that mimics across the region adopted their name. If Osama actually cared a whit about the US that was probably another success - he managed, with the help of our totally disproportionate and chaotic response of course, to turn us from one of the most-loved nations in the world into a nation broadly considered to be one of the single greatest threats to global security. He may have underestimated just how useful his attack and the promise of perpetual war was going to be to certain tyrannical interests in the US government, and got himself killed due to our dogged persistence, but still, very nearly an unqualified success.
About What I Expected (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the posts in response to this story seem to focus on
* Bad Grammar
* Bad Jokes
* US Politics (how the fuck everything can be related to US politics is beyond me)
* Ethnic Slurs (including of course the obligatory insults to Muslims that must appear in any article on anything these days. Keep up the hate guys, its only helping your reputation with the rest of the world).
* Lastly, and apparently leastly, some outrage at the destruction of a part of human history, thus lessening our understanding of the same by some degree. A site like this belongs to all of humanity, its our heritage, its a way to understand where we came from and thus perhaps where we might be going. The people who knocked this temple down (and the owner of the company responsible) should be in prison for the rest of their lives.
Hopefully this at least serves to make governments all through the region aware of the need to protect heritage sites like this. Without our history, we are *nothing*.
Re:I've been to Belize (Score:4, Insightful)
He didn't claim they were responsible. The words "GOP mecca" means something like "GOP dream world". As in what the GOP would like to turn the USA into (even more than the US already is) - a place where the people with money can buy their way into getting anything they want.
Yea, OK, so why single out the GOP?
If you stop paying attention to the lip-service and instead note only their actions, there is very, very little difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Re:Temple in the picture is not Noh mul, it's Lami (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. They excavated the material for road fill, they knew exactly what it was and the quality of the material they would obtain and how much money they would save paying for quarried material trucked to the site. You do not just use any passing dirt for road fill because it will be impossible to compact properly and could be subject to extreme bulking when exposed to water, you do not randomly excavate hills because you do not know what they constitute and how difficult they will be to excavate.
You win the prize for civil construction ignorance as do those who thought your ignorance was informative. Even ancient Romans knew better than you http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_roads [wikipedia.org] please check diagram at bottom of article.
The greedy shit head owner of the company knew exactly what they were doing and how much they would save.
Re:Well its not a good time for pyramids (Score:5, Insightful)
Greetings and Salutations;
I feel as if I am feeding the trolls here, although this is such a fantasy trip that it almost is insulting to trolls to compare it to them. Your re-writing of history is neither accurate nor anywhere near the facts. The fact of the matter is that the previous administration (a REPUBLICAN one) truly scared the world because it was so random and irrational. After all, Dubya, in response to a terrorist attack used bad data to justify an 11 year war on a country that did not have a bloody thing to do with 9/11. However, there was one telling conference where he spoke the truth about his motivations for going into Iraq. In the conference, when pressed on why Iraq and Saddam were a target he said "...he tried to kill my daddy...".
America's image in the world has taken many hits in the past few decades, thanks to the two-faced dealings we have had with many countries, and, the brutal dictatorships we have supported. When Pres. Obama was elected, there was dancing in the streets in other countries because they thought, finally, a very intelligent, rational person was at the controls, and, the actions that caused America to lose face would change. They, did not realize that America is a huge ship, and, it takes a lot of time an ocean to turn it around. They also did not realize how much the Republicans hated Pres. Obama, and, how they would do anything they could to force him to fail. These, and other factors, have caused his presidency to be far less effective than it could have been.
So...do not fool yourself. America has not been the "most loved" country in the world for a long time. We might still have a chance to get there, but, it will take time, and a change in attitudes of the representatives in the Federal government away from competition and towards actually doing things that are good for the country as a whole.
Re:I've been to Belize (Score:2, Insightful)
and the people in the USA and the most dogmatic assertions will include GOP as the root of evil
I don't think anyone argues that the GOP is the root of all evil so much as they are a successful implementation of the evil specification.