Las Playas Intaglio, damaged by Az-Mx border wall contractors, is older than Egyptian pyramids & Stonehenge

The Las Playas Intaglio — a 200-foot-long etching in the Southern Arizona resembling a giant fish — is at least 6,500 years old, according to new research. That means the site is older than the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge.

Despite efforts by the Tohono O’odham Nation and cultural monitors to protect the sacred ancient artifact in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildife Refuge, border wall contractors bulldozed a swath through its center in late April.

The intaglio was previously estimated to be around 1,000 years old, however, a new dating technique using samples collected in 1979 found it is one of the oldest “geo-glyphs” in the Americas, according to archaeologists David S. Whitley and Ronald I. Dorn, who published their findings in the September issue of The SAA Archaeological Record.

“What we’ve got here is a monumental form of art that’s older than the pyramids,” said Whitley in an interview with the Tucson Sentinel on Wednesday. “This is incredibly important, not just because it’s old, but it is rare because these things usually don’t last this long.”

The research showed the design was etched into the ground thousands of years before the first Egyptian pyramid and Peru’s Nazca Lines were built.

On April 28, Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Verlon Jose and other tribal leaders learned a contractor damaged the intaglio even after the tribe sought to protect the site, which sits just yards north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

“The site was desecrated despite the fact that it previously had been identified by a cultural protection monitor as a site for the contractor to avoid,” said Tohono O’odham leaders in a statement in May.

“This was a devastating and entirely avoidable loss,” Jose said in a published statement. “There is nothing more important than our history, which is what makes us who we are as O’odham. The site was also an irreplaceable piece of the United States’ history, one none of us can ever get back.”

The damage at the site 144 miles southwest of Tucson was part of the Trump administration’s headlong drive to built a new layer of border barriers across most of Arizona’s border with Mexico. The tribe’s lands are split by the border.

Despite dwindling numbers of people attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, the Trump administration has sought to spend $51.6 billion in border wall construction authorized by the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” including around $4.5 billion in Arizona.

In December, the agency laid out its desire to expand the barriers deeper into formally-protected land, laying out plans to build 225 miles of “barrier system,” including both primary and secondary walls where “operationally appropriate” in Pima, Yuma, Santa Cruz, and Cochise counties.

This includes 19 miles of primary wall, as well as 42 miles of “secondary barrier.”

The agency also wants install fiber-optic cables, lighting poles with stadium-style lights, surveillance cameras, and access and patrol roads throughout.

In Cabeza Prieta, the new secondary wall will follow the contours of land and cleave away dozens of acres of land from public access.

Images from the Center for Biological Diversity showed the contractor effectively carved a road straight through the heart of the ancient artifact, and did this despite a small rock line demarcating the intaglio. Closer to the wall were clear signs construction vehicles drove close to one end of the intaglio.

CBP officials confirmed the damage, and blamed it on a contractor.

“On April 23, 2026, a border wall contractor inadvertently disturbed a cultural site known as Las Playas Intaglio located west of Ajo, Arizona along the border,” said a CBP spokesman in May. He added CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott was “engaged directly with tribal leadership to determine appropriate next steps. The remaining portion of the site has been secured and will be protected in place.”

Tribal officials later told the Tucson Sentinel that DHS officials apologized for the incident, but the act set the stage for how they believe border wall contractors will behave when they move to build a 62-mile long wall on the Tohono O’odham Nation itself.

The agency is currently seeking public comment on the project, expanding on a previous round when the agency asked the public for input on the “potential impacts to the environment, culture, and commerce, including potential socioeconomic impacts, and quality of life” from the project. These comments will be accepted until October 12.

Based at the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, Whitley has worked with Dorn to date other intaglios in Southern California and Arizona.

After the intaglio was damaged in late April, he and Dorn—who works at Arizona State University’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning— decided to try and date the intaglio using a few “cobbles” collected by a fellow archaeologist Julian Hayden in 1979. Those samples were cleared away from the intaglio by natural processes, Whitley said. And, they found “a pretty amazing result.”

At Dorn’s lab at ASU, the pair tested the rock varnish coating on the samples and estimated the intaglio could have been created 6,500 to 7,300 years ago, making the Las Plays Intaglio the oldest of the “geo-glyphs” in the Americas. This result “emphasizing the significance of this site and the parallel great misfortune resulting from its damage.”

The technique matches the microscopic layers of rock varnish to a regional record of ancient climatic conditions, and three samples supported their estimate the intaglio is at least 6,500 years old. But, the glyphs could be even older.

This means the intaglio was created about 2,000 years before the first pyramids in Egypt, 4,000 years before the Nazca Lines, and 1,500 years before the first construction of Stonehenge, noted Russ McSpadden, Southwest conservation advocate at the Center for Biological Diversity.

Whitley said a similar intaglio near the Colorado River is also ancient, but the samples showed Las Playas Intaglio is “a little bit older.”

He said the age of the intaglio demonstrates that tribal groups—including the Mojave, Hohokam and Tohono O’odham— lived in the region for millennia, and they used these images as part of their religious traditions.

“There’s just no question that they were created and used for religious purposes, and continue to be so today,” Whitley said. “I think that’s an important factor, they continue to be part of the the cultural tradition, the religious tradition of these peoples. Sometimes folks tend to think that all this has died out, and it’s simply not true.”

“These are still active religions, active traditions, and that’s what makes the destruction, in a way, all the worse,” Whitley said.

Lorraine Marquez Eiler, an Hia-Ced O’odham elder and co-founder of the International Sonoran Desert Alliance, told the Tucson Sentinel in July that she believed contractors “deliberately” damaged the Intaglio.

“There’s there’s no mercy as far as they’re concerned,” she said, adding she worried contractors would damage Quitobaquito Springs as they moved to build a secondary border wall along the southern edge of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument.

Carla Johnson, the vice chair for the Tohono O’odham, said the destruction of the intaglio set a benchmark for DHS’s likely behavior if they are allowed to build a border wall along the tribe’s border with Mexico, where the current vehicle barrier zig-zags to protect “sensitive” cultural sites.

Johnson noted cultural monitors were attached to the border wall project in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and yet, a contractor seriously damaged the intaglio.

She also dismissed an apology from CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott. “What weight does that hold?”

She said May’s incident set a benchmark “from respect to complete disrespect of our land.”

Earlier this year, the tribe sued in an attempt to stop the effort on the nation, and while a judge rejected the tribe’s request for a preliminary injunction, they asked the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to weigh in. On Wednesday, dozens of groups filed briefs in support of the tribe’s lawsuit, including Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs.

“This discovery makes an already devastating loss even more profound. It’s a cultural and historical atrocity,” said McSpadden. “Imagine the worldwide outrage if a government bulldozed part of Stonehenge to build a wall. This sacred place is even older. Indigenous heritage deserves that same commitment to protection.”

He added Congress should demand CBP and other officials testify to establish who authorized and carried out the work that damaged the intaglio.

“People deserve to know what warnings were given and why safeguards, if they existed, failed,” McSpadden said.

Wiley said the intaglios in Southern Arizona and California show in part the sophistication of Native Americans, and highlights how they got by in “very harsh environments with a minimal amount of of technology. And that’s because they were cognitively very sophisticated.”

“This an extraordinary kind of archeological evidence that really it’s been understudied historically,” Whitley said. “We’re just really learning to grapple with it, and we need to be sure that we don’t lose it. We need to ensure that it is served for future generations to study, if only because they’ll have better abilities to do so than we maybe do now.”