Construction crews building Trump's border wall have damaged part of a Native American archaeological complex in Arizona at least a thousand years old

The Las Playas Intaglio is a sacred geoglyph in the shape of a fish, laid out on the desert surface in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in south-western Arizona. The full length of the figure is about 83 metres. The contractor's heavy construction machinery ran across 20 metres of it, which is to say it destroyed roughly a quarter of the monument.

The fish-shaped intaglio was made by removing the dark "desert varnish" from the surface, beneath which paler soil is exposed. Unlike a petroglyph, such a figure can be seen only from above, and is visible from hills, from an aircraft or from a satellite.

The monument is associated with the ancestors of the Tohono O'odham people, whose lands lie to the east of the refuge, and is regarded as a sacred site which the local community continues to visit for spiritual purposes.

The Border Patrol acknowledged that the monument had been inadvertently disturbed, and promised to protect the surviving part. There is no talk of restoration, because none exists for an intaglio: the removed layer of desert patina or rock varnish restores itself naturally over two to three thousand years.