I think I'd heard of this before, but not that it had got this bad. Poor dog. We've had other incidents of archaeological remains being destroyed in South America before.
Of course, destruction of remains has been going on since forever; new incomers don't tend to care very much about other people's posterity. They just use building stone for their own purposes, which historically often used to occur quite far away because old sites were believed to be haunted (usually only at night) or at least felt ominous to people who believed in ghosts, or because the previous residents had exhausted the land. (I think a major aspect of human history is engaging in unsustainable practices that then contributed to making places uninhabitable so that they had to move on. This was most often related to a lack of water, i.e. humans contributing to desertification by accelerating natural cycles.) As we're now seeing again, although with better medical capabilities than people in former times, there will also have been numerous pandemics throughout history that would have brought large population sizes down again.
That's one reason why you find so many 'lost civilisations', impressively-built up areas that evidently supported large populations but which were then seemingly abandoned completely as the usual resource wars swept over people, causing many to flee and seek a new life elsewhere.
How being an archaeologist can be risky at times:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/03/squatters-ancient-ruins-peru-death-threats-archeologist-caral
I think I'd heard of this before, but not that it had got this bad. Poor dog. We've had other incidents of archaeological remains being destroyed in South America before.
Of course, destruction of remains has been going on since forever; new incomers don't tend to care very much about other people's posterity. They just use building stone for their own purposes, which historically often used to occur quite far away because old sites were believed to be haunted (usually only at night) or at least felt ominous to people who believed in ghosts, or because the previous residents had exhausted the land. (I think a major aspect of human history is engaging in unsustainable practices that then contributed to making places uninhabitable so that they had to move on. This was most often related to a lack of water, i.e. humans contributing to desertification by accelerating natural cycles.) As we're now seeing again, although with better medical capabilities than people in former times, there will also have been numerous pandemics throughout history that would have brought large population sizes down again.
That's one reason why you find so many 'lost civilisations', impressively-built up areas that evidently supported large populations but which were then seemingly abandoned completely as the usual resource wars swept over people, causing many to flee and seek a new life elsewhere.