The Mayan pyramid bulldozed by a construction company was one of Belize’s largest Mayan pyramid, reports the Associated Press. The company has practically destroyed the pyramid with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project.

The head of the Belize Institute of Arachaeology, Jaime Awe, said that the destruction at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize was detected late last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2,300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, which is near the border with Mexico.

Awe said of the destruction, "It's a feeling of Incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity ... they were using this for road fill. It's like being punched in the stomach, it's just so horrendous."

Nohmul sat in the middle of a privately owned sugar cane field, and lacked the even stone sides frequently seen in reconstructed or better-preserved pyramids. Awe said, however, that the builders could not possibly have mistaken the pyramid mound, which is about 100 feet tall, for a natural hill because the ruins were well-known and the landscape there is naturally flat.

Awe said that the construction company knew that what they were bulldozing is an ancient structure and “it’s just bloody laziness” that caused them to destroy the Mayan pyramid.

Photos from the bulldozed area showed backhoes clawing away at the pyramid’s sloping sides, leaving an isolated core of limestone cobbles at the center, with what appears to be a narrow Mayan chamber dangling above one clawed-out section of the structure.

"Just to realize that the ancient Maya acquired all this building material to erect these buildings, using nothing more than stone tools and quarried the stone, and carried this material on their heads, using tump lines," Awe said about the event. "To think that today we have modern equipment, that you can go and excavate in a quarry anywhere, but that this company would completely disregard that and completely destroyed this building. Why can't these people just go and quarry somewhere that has no cultural significance? It's mind-boggling."

Belizean police said they are conducting an investigation and criminal charges maybe levied on the individuals responsible for the pyramid’s destruction. The Nohmul complex sits on private land, but Belizean law states that any pre-Hispanic ruins are under government protection.

The Belize community-action group Citizens Organized for Liberty Through Action labeled the destruction of the Mayan pyramids “an obscure example of disrespect for the environment and history.”

It’s not the first time an event like this happened in Belize, a country of about 350,000 people that is largely covered in jungle and is filled with hundreds of Mayan ruin sites. Few of them were as large as Nohmul.