I am not a violent person, but, every time I think of Isis or any other group destroying ancient architecture, I get the urge to wring someone's neck. I hate having that feeling and am glad it goes away fast.

to steer toward a better future.

We really need what we can learn from these physical parts of history.

The Americas have unimaginably complex, advanced engineering, etc. in their architecture, the people living today descended from a world far more advanced than that of the scum who invaded the Americas and started their destruction of the humans already living there.

We need to know what the ancestors knew, how they experienced their cultures, what their beliefs were, etc. We need to know ASAP!

I read a couple of years ago a landowner in Peru actually sold some of his huge property to a contractor who got right to work and had some bulldozers, etc. almost entirely destroy a pyramid which was on that land, as they wanted to build some commercial #### there, instead. Unbelievable! Unforgiveable.

But, destroying ruins for no good reason sickens me.

they're also digging small items up with no regard to where they are found or what context they are found in so they can hawk them to billionaires snapping up everything they can on the antiquities black market. This is how they're getting some of their funding now that the price of oil is still half what it used to be.

Sadly, they're not the only ones doing this. There are pot hunters even here in NM, wrecking sites to get to semi intact ancient pottery for billionaires with plenty of money but no brains.

within the same terrain separated by ages between them.

One population center, "Uxmal," was named, long ago, when it was developed, "Thrice Destroyed," to remind people that in remote times there were two separate ancient cultures there with eons between them.

It has always been the pattern that the conquering invaders who destroy cultures, and the people, and their history all contend those people were evil and imply for their descendants they should have been destroyed because they were too evil to live.

Some people don't seem to have any grasp of what "civilizations" in Europe actually did to people for various reasons in their remote pasts.

Sacrifice? Torture? Slavery? The people of the Americas were in no way more barbaric than those in Europe.

both to clear fields for agriculture and to provide fuel for the beginning of the industrial revolution. Much of the area has been reforested, mostly with volunteer trees, since once coal had started to be mined and shipped north, there was no longer much need for wood or charcoal to power factories. All over the area, you can see rock walls in dense woods, old boundaries of forgotten farms gone back to forest. The area was never that good for heavy agriculture between the short growing season and the rocky soil.

It's been speculated here in the west that partial deforestation contributed to the drought that wiped out the Anasazi culture.

What seems to be most problematic in terms of changing weather here in the US is the destruction of the prairie and the reliance of ground water to make up for it. The soil is thinning and the ground water is running out. Chances are a mixture of prairie and agriculture dedicated to feeding people instead of meat animals will serve us much better.