Trumps border wall construction cut into an ancient ground carving older than Stonehenge

An ancient ground carving that was severely damaged by the administration’s border wall construction was created before Stonehenge and Egypt’s oldest pyramid, according to recently publicized research.The Las Playas Intaglio, a giant fish carved into the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, is now considered the oldest example in the Americas of a geoglyphic, the ancient art form that is carved into or drawn on the ground.In April, contractors hired by the Trump administration to make way for a second wall along the Arizona-Mexico border “scraped” a 50-foot swath through the ancient carving, according to the Center for Biological Diversity, which documented the damage.

The intaglio on the ground of the ancestral homeland of the Tohono O’odham and other Indigenous tribes is estimated to be about 2,000 years older than Egypt’s first pyramid and to have been created about 1,500 years before the first construction of Stonehenge and 4,000 years before Peru’s Nazca Lines, researchers have found.The formerly 272-foot carving had originally been thought to be about 1,000 years old.

But the latest research dates the art’s creation to at least 6,500 years ago, and possibly as much as 7,500 years ago.That age emphasizes “the significance of this site and the parallel great misfortune resulting from its damage,” the researchers said in an article published in The SAA Archaeological Record.

A comparison of images of the site of the fish-shaped intaglio (geoglyphic) before and after the border wall construction at Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in Arizona.Courtesy Russ McSpadden / Center for Biological Diversity“This discovery makes an already devastating loss even more profound.It’s a cultural and historical atrocity,” Russ McSpadden, Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement.

A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said in an email to NBC News that the contractor “inadvertently disturbed” t...