PotashCorp has contributed $60,000 to the excavation and preservation of ruins in the Guatemalan rainforest that represent the cradle of Mayan civilization. The area known as the Mirador Basin contains the largest pyramid in the world and the remains of hundreds of ancient cities and towns.

"These are the oldest Mayan ruins found," said Stephen Dowdle, Senior Vice President, Fertilizer Sales, PCS Sales, an agronomist who studied cultural anthropology as an undergraduate. This thousand-year-long civilization dates to the Preclassic period (2500BC-AD150) – much older than the better-known Mayan period.

"It's going to need a lot of support from the private and public sectors to excavate so the world can come and see the ruins."

Prominent local businessman and long-time PotashCorp customer Roberto Dalton, and PotashCorp International Sales Manager Dandan Xiang brought the project to the company's attention.

Dowdle, Xiang and Dalton traveled to the Mirador with Guatemalan President Alvara Colom to see the world's largest pyramid by volume. The trip occurred just two days after Dowdle handed the Guatemalan leader PotashCorp's check to help the work spearheaded by archaeologist Richard Hansen. The President passed it to the Asociacion de Amigos del Patrimonio Cultural y Natural de Guatemala Balam-Kan (APANAC).

"Hansen is attempting to find a sustainable way to bring tourists to the area, and not destroy it," Dowdle said. With much of the Guatemalan rainforest destroyed by fire or logging, the 600,000-acre basin has great ecological as well as cultural importance.

The ruins are all that remain of the hemisphere's first state-level society, an advanced and powerful civilization that grew up because of the area's special marsh mud, says Hansen, who has worked in the area for 27 years. Farmers used that mud to supply nutrients to their fields and terraces.

But, as the society prospered, Dowdle said, buildings became larger, requiring greater quantities of wood and limestone to make lime. The deforested highlands eroded, covering with clay the marsh mud that ensured soil fertility. The civilization quickly collapsed.

"This is just another example of how stewardship of soil fertility can define a civilization," he said. "You can relate the rise and fall of many societies to soil fertility."

Dowdle's most memorable moment of the trip came when he crawled after Richard Hansen through a tunnel and put his hands in the stone prints of the man who had hung on there while plastering, 3,000 years ago. He marvels at the opportunity, "in a tactile sense, to connect with someone so old."

"You don't get to do that every day."

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