Trump Bulldozed a 1,000-Year-Old Archeological Site to Make Room for a Second Border Wall |
Special Investigations
Press Freedom Defense Fund
Trump Bulldozed a 1,000-Year-Old Archeological Site to Make Room for a Second Border Wall
DHS was in talks with the wildlife refuge that hosts the ancient site to make sure it was protected, a local archeologist said.
A rare archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert was bulldozed by a Department of Homeland Security contractor involved in building the latest sections of Donald Trump’s border wall, according to multiple sources briefed on the incident.
The area, in a remote corner of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, is a nearly 280-by-50-foot etching in the desert sand known as an intaglio.
Last Friday, without any notice, a contractor working for DHS cut a roughly 60-foot swath across the middle of the intaglio, doing irreparable damage to the 1,000-year-old artifact.
“I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines — something that culturally we should have been relishing and promoting.”
“I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines — something that culturally we should have been relishing and promoting.”
Cabeza Prieta, one of the largest wilderness areas outside of Alaska, also encompasses lands sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation, which borders the refuge to the east. The O’odham have fought to prevent border wall construction across their reservation and during Trump’s first term largely prevailed; they also managed to protect the intaglio and a nearby burial site that they consider to be part of their ancestral lands.
“I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines — something that culturally we should have been relishing and promoting. Not destroying,” Rick Martynec, an archaeologist, said in a phone interview, referring to the hundreds of figures drawn into the deserts of southern Peru.
The destruction was confirmed by a federal employee with direct knowledge of the incident, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
Well-known to government officials, including the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, the intaglio lies just 10 or 15 feet from the massive steel wall that now runs along the U.S.–Mexico border. The destruction to the ancient site was first reported by the Washington Post.
Rick and Sandy Martynec, his wife, also an archeologist who has studied the site for more than two decades, said the refuge was in talks with DHS and the contractor to make sure the site was protected as the Trump administration moves forward with a second set of barriers in the ecologically sensitive region.
The Martynecs even visited the........