New research shows that an archaeological site damaged by border wall construction is the oldest of its kind in the Americas.
The Las Playas Intaglio is a fish-shaped geoglyph in Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Intaglio geoglyphs are large designs scraped into hard rock, and are visible from above.
Last spring, border wall construction blazed a 50-foot swath through the Las Playas geoglyph. At the time, it was thought to be 1,000 years old. But a new study puts it at over 6,500 years old — making it about 1,500 years older than Stonehenge and 2,000 years older than the first Egyptian pyramid.
Russ McSpadden, Southwest Conservation Advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an Instagram video that the discovery made the damage all the more tragic.
“This discovery makes an already devastating loss even more profound. It’s a cultural and historical atrocity,” he said. “The Trump administration’s destruction of this 6,500-year-old site is a wound to the deep history of Indigenous communities and impoverishes all of humanity. No administration has the moral authority to bulldoze an irreplaceable piece of the human story.”
According to McSpadden, U.S. Customs and Border Protection were made aware of the site’s importance over a decade ago, and that contractors for the border wall disregarded boulders placed around the site to protect it.
The Las Playas Intaglio is located on the ancestral homelands of the Tohono O’odham Nation and is considered an important part of their history. The new findings come as border wall construction inches closer to other sacred sites, such as Quitobaquito Springs in Organ Pipe Cactus National Park.
CBP has said they will not destroy Quitobaquito, but reporting from AZPM shows bulldozers approaching it on both sides. McSpadden is skeptical of their promise.
“At this point, I don’t really trust anything that \[Customs and Border Protection\] or their contractors say, and I think a big reason for that is the destruction of the intaglio,” he said.
The Tohono O’odham Nation has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection.
