BELIZE CITY — A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize's largest Maya pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities announced Monday.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said 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, near the border with Mexico.

"It's a feeling of Incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity ... they were using this for road fill," Awe said. "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. But Awe said the builders could not possibly have mistaken the pyramid mound, which is about 100 feet (30 meters) tall, for a natural hill because the ruins were well-known and the landscape there is naturally flat.

"These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It's just bloody laziness," Awe said.

Photos from the scene 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 Maya chamber dangling above one clawed-out section.

"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," said Awe. "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."

AP

A backhoe claws away at the sloping sides of the Nohmul complex in northern Belize on Friday.

Belizean police said they are conducting an investigation, and criminal charges are possible. The Nohmul complex sits on private land, but Belizean law says that any pre-Hispanic ruins are under government protection.

The Belize community-action group Citizens Organized for Liberty Through Action called the destruction of the archaeological site "an obscene example of disrespect for the environment and history."

Not the first time
It is not the first time it's happened in Belize, a country of about 350,000 people that is largely covered in jungle and dotted with hundreds of Maya ruins, though few as large as Nohmul.

Norman Hammond, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Boston University who worked in Belizean research projects in the 1980s, wrote in an email that "bulldozing Maya mounds for road fill is an endemic problem in Belize (the whole of the San Estevan center has gone, both of the major pyramids at Louisville, other structures at Nohmul, many smaller sites), but this sounds like the biggest yet."

Arlen Chase, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Central Florida, said, "Archaeologists are disturbed when such things occur, but there is only a very limited infrastructure in Belize that can be applied to cultural heritage management."

"Unfortunately, they (destruction of sites) are all too common, but not usually in the center of a large Maya site," Chase wrote.

He said there had probably still been much to learn from the site. "A great deal of archaeology was undertaken at Nohmul in the '70s and '80s, but this only sampled a small part of this large center."

Heritage disappearing
Belize isn't the only place where the handiwork of the far-flung and enormously prolific Maya builders is being destroyed. The ancient Mayas spread across southeastern Mexico and through Guatemala, Honduras and Belize.

"I don't think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived," wrote Francisco Estrada-Belli, a professor at Tulane University's Anthropology Department. "Unfortunately, this destruction of our heritage is irreversible but many don't take it seriously. The only way to stop it is by showing that it is a major crime and people can and will go to jail for it."

Robert Rosenswig, an archaeologist at the State University of New York at Albany, described the difficult and heartbreaking work of trying to salvage information at the nearby site of San Estevan following similar destruction around 2005.

"Bulldozing damage at San Estevan is extensive and the site is littered with Classic period potsherds," he wrote in an academic paper describing the scene. "We spent a number of days at the beginning of the 2005 season trying to figure out the extent of the damage .... after scratching our heads for many days, a bulldozer showed up and we realized that what appear to be mounds, when overgrown with chest-high vegetation, are actually recently bulldozed garbage piles."

However small the compensation, bulldozing pyramids is one very brutal way of revealing the inner cores of the structures, which were often built up in periodic stages of construction.

"The one advantage of this massive destruction, to the core site, is that the remains of early domestic activity are now visible on the surface," Rosenswig wrote. 

Associated Press writer Patrick E. Jones reported this story in Belize, and Mark Stevenson reported from Mexico City. Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Takeshi Inomata

Workers stand on Platform A-24 at the Ceibal archaeological site in Guatemala. Archaeologists say the dig revealed the oldest monumental construction in the Maya lowlands.

Archaeologists say that ceremonial structures unearthed in Guatemala are centuries older than they expected — and that the findings point to new theories for the rise of Maya culture.

"The origin of Maya civilization was more complex than previously thought," the University of Arizona's Takeshi Inomata, lead researcher for a study appearing in this week's issue of the journal Science, told reporters on Thursday. Even though all this happened 3,000 years ago, the findings could provide fresh insights about social change in general, he said.

The Maya had their heyday in Mexico and Central America between the year 250 and 900, but the roots of their culture go much farther back. There are several schools of thought about how their distinctive culture arose: Some archaeologists say the central features of Maya cultural life, including grand ceremonies centered on broad plazas and pyramids, were borrowed from Mexico's older Olmec civilization. Others say those features arose internally, without much outside influence.

Inomata said the excavations at Ceibal, in Guatemala's Maya lowlands, suggest a more complicated scenario. Over the course of seven years, he and his colleagues dug down more than 50 feet, analyzed the layers of sediment, and did scores of radiocarbon-dating tests to trace the evolution of Ceibal's structures. They concluded that Ceibal's Maya rulers started building ceremonial plazas and platforms around 1000 B.C., and had turned those structures into a central pyramid and plaza by 800 B.C. 

That would mean Ceibal's residents were developing the architectural and religious hallmarks of Maya society before the first appearance of those hallmarks in Olmec society, at La Venta, hundreds of miles away on Mexico's Gulf Coast. La Venta's ceremonial structures have been dated to about 800 B.C.

Science / AAAS

Ceibal lies in Guatemala's Maya lowlands. The Olmec centers of San Lorenzo and La Venta were hundreds of miles away, in Mexico. Researchers say Ceibal also was influenced by other communities in central Chiapas and along the Pacific coast.

Other Maya settlements were building such structures around that same time, although they weren't as developed as Ceibal's. A wide spectrum of Mesoamerican communities — for example, settlements in central Chiapas and those on the southern Pacific coast — may have had a lot of important interactions with Ceibal and other communities in the Maya lowland during this period, Inomata said.

He stressed that the Olmec almost certainly influenced Maya culture during the centuries that predated Ceibal's rise. For example, there's evidence that an Olmec center near San Lorenzo was dominant well before Ceibal's residents began building their ritual structurs. However, Inomata said, "San Lorenzo didn't have the kind of ceremonial complexes that we're talking about."

The period from 1000 and 800 B.C. appears to have been a key turning point for Maya culture. There may have been a "power vacuum" between the fall of San Lorenzo and the rise of La Venta that gave early Maya communities the opportunity to experiment and develop cultural innovations, Inomata said. "We are looking at major change in this period, and that happened really in the absence of a very strong Olmec center," he told reporters.

The construction of Ceibal's ceremonial complexes would have required the participation of the whole community, said the University of Arizona's Daniela Triadan, who is a co-author of the Science paper as well as Inomata's wife. "Some people might already have had a special position in the community, and they were most certainly people with specialized ritual knowledge. This indicates that the transition from a mobile hunter-gatherer and horticultural lifestyle to permanently settled agriculturalists was rapid," she said.

What drove that rapid change? The research team is still looking into potential environmental factors, but Inomata speculated that the cultivation of maize — that is, corn — may have been decisive. "There may have been a major increase in maize production, which may have been a threshold in terms of the development of cultural elements," he said.

"This is not just a study about this specific civilization," Inomata told reporters. "We also want to think about how human societies change, and how human civilization developed. What we are seeing here is that major renovation and change can happen through the interaction of various groups. It doesn't have to come from powerful, major political centers. That's one important implication that we are getting."

More about the Olmec and the Maya:

• Olmec influence stretched hundreds of miles
• Maya doom teaches climate lesson
• Cosmic Log archive on Maya culture

In addition to Inomata and Triadan, the authors of "Early Ceremonial Constructions at Ceibal, Guatemala, and the Origins of Lowland Maya Civilization" include Kazuo Aoyama, Victor Castillo and Hitoshi Yonenobu.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Jennifer Loughmiller-Newman via RCMS

A codex-style flask from Mexico, dated to the year 700, bears Mayan hieroglyphics reading "y-otoot 'u-may," translated as "the home of its/his/her tobacco."

Researchers have identified traces of nicotine inside a 1,300-year-old Mayan flask, confirming the vessel's ancient use and providing the earliest chemical evidence of tobacco in Maya culture.

There's been ample evidence from textual and pictorial sources that the Maya smoked tobacco. For example, at Mexico's Palenque archaeological site, one of the carved stone panels at the Temple of the Cross shows a man smoking what appears to be an ornate pipe.

Other evidence suggests that the Maya and other ancient Mesoamerican cultures smoked tobacco either in pipes or in cigar-type bundles. The sacred text of the Quiche Maya, the Popol Vuh, says the story's two heroes were once required to keep their cigars lit all night in a cave of darkness — but fooled the people of the underworld by putting fireflies on the ends of their cigars instead. Spaniards who came in contact with the Maya in the 16th century reported seeing the natives puffing on cigars.

This week's research, published in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, is the first to link tobacco's active ingredient with a vessel labeled as containing the goods, according to Dmitri Zagorevski, a biochemist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Jennifer Loughmiller-Newman, an archaeologist at the University of Albany in New York.

Zagorevski and Loughmiller-Newman analyzed samples taken from a Mayan flask that was made in Mexico's southern Campeche state and became part of the Library of Congress' Kislak Collection. The flask has been dated to around the year 700, during the Late Classic Maya period (A.D. 600-900). It is marked with Mayan hieroglyphs reading "y-otoot 'u-may," which is translated as "the house of its/his/her tobacco."

The researchers detected traces of nicotine in the samples using gas-chromatography mass spectrometry and liquid-chromatography mass spectrometry. That confirmed that the flask actually housed someone's tobacco.

"Investigation of food items consumed by ancient people offers insight into the traditions and customs of a particular civilization," Loughmiller-Newman explained in a news release. "Textual evidence written on pottery is often an indicator of contents or of an intended purpose; however, actual usage of a container could be altered or falsely represented."

She and Zagorevski said chemical analysis has been used only once before to confirm the contents of a Mayan vessel labeled with hieroglyphics. That case, reported more than 20 years ago, involved the confirmation that a vessel contained cacao through the detection of caffeine and an alkaloid known as theobromine.

The researchers said recovering food residues for analysis is a "very difficult task" for several reasons, including the fact that ancient vessels may contain other substances in addition to the stuff being sought. For example, most of the Kislak Collection's flasks were filled with reddish iron oxide for burial rituals, making it harder to determine what the vessels originally held.

"Our study provides rare evidence of the intended use of an ancient container," Zagorevski said in the news release, issued today. "Mass spectrometry has proven to be an invaluable method of analysis of organic residues in archaeological artifacts. This discovery is not only significant to understanding Mayan hieroglyphics, but an important archaeological application of chemical detection." 

Extra credit: This research was originally due for public release on Thursday, but the embargo was lifted after the news release popped up on The Tree of Life blog as part of a protest by UC-Davis biologist Jonathan Eisen against "press release spam." The episode has sparked a discussion of press embargoes on Ivan Oransky's Embargo Watch. Meanwhile, Loughmiller-Newman and Zagorevski have promised to get back to me with additional comments on the research, and I'll add those comments to this posting as they come in.

Update for 8 p.m. ET: Loughmiller-Newman tells me that the tobacco in the flask might not have been used for smoking. "It's a very small container," she said. "My guess is that it would have been used for treatment of bug bites, or to ward off snakes, or perhaps as a snuff."

She explained that the Maya used tobacco in its powdered form as a snake repellent ("It 'burns' them on their body beneath their scales") and to combat botfly larvae ("One way to suffocate the larvae and keep them from growing is to put powdered tobacco on ths skin"). The powder could also be snorted like snuff, or added to alcoholic drinks for an extra kick.

"This was very strong tobacco, much stronger than it is today," she said. "Nicotiana rustica was nearly hallucinogenic."

Like, wow.

More about ancient drugs:

• Gallery: Good times in ancient times
• Eight ancient drinks uncorked by science
• World's oldest pot stash totally busted
• Mesopotamian tales tell of tavern etiquette
• Did beer lubricate the rise of civilization?
• Murals reveal how the ancient Maya lived

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.