You must log in or register to comment.
Ahh yes, so the future generations of archaeologists have a Pompeii to uncover
It ain’t much but it’s honest work.
Its arrogant to think all the information we have now will survive long term. Future humans may curse us for the all history we’ve destroyed while studying history.
Found in a time capsule in 2150: hey guys, we left you a little something over there by Vesuvius…you’ll thank us later. And you better not have built a McDonald’s on it…
But why though?
Our records of the state of pompei are stored in computers and books, which will decay a lot faster than buried stone. In 300 years, people might get bored of Pompeii and the records could be left in disrepair, or maybe contemporary retellings of the history will have picked up a lot of falsehoods due to natural drift. And this is to say nothing of the possibility of society collapsing due to climate change.
If Pompeii is buried, then in 1000 years archeologists can go check for themselves if the information they have is accurate. Just like we did.
Do you think there is 1 copy of a book on Pompeii and a single hard drive? Your idea makes sense to my high cousin. So are you just high fam?
Hard drives don’t last 20 years, and even then, there can be an unforeseen event that can render those drives inoperable. Preserving the original site would just be another form of redundancy.
Oh boy, let me tell you about this new thing we just discovered called “backups.” Or this other thing we have called the “printing press.”
You see, it’s possible to print 1,000,000+ copies of a book on Pompeii and digitize it, and then back up that digital file on 1,000,000+ hdd/ssds.
To erase all of that, you’d need every copy of that book to be destroyed in many fires and solar flares or EMPs to knock out all technology ever. It is theoretically possible, sure, but it isn’t like the only copy of the only book on Pompeii and also the only hdd containing copies are kept in the Library of Alexandria.
I think the last part of your question is the most relevant to this conversation …
… are you just high fam?
Abusers sure do love constantly accusing neurodivergent people of being high. It’s because people like you feel threatened by neurodivergent people and feel the need to dismiss us as not being of sound mind. If you can reduce our lived experiences and disabilities to a chemical, you have power over us under common social conventions. It’s about power and control.
Or your question just seems so out of touch that it is easy to confuse someone as being under the influence of drugs. This is the public internet and we have no way of knowing who you are, what state you’re in, what kind of health conditions or situation you have, or even what culture, age, gender or intelligence you have. We all just assume that people are of average intelligence and know how to use a computer and get online to a forum like this … which makes us think that the person is fairly intelligent and capable (not that anyone on Lemmy or the Fediverse is automatically a genius). So it was easy to assume that someone asking the question you did was either someone without a lot of experience, someone with little education, someone under the influence of drugs or someone who is intelligent and experienced and just pretending to not know.
To get away from either making fun of someone, belittling them or even dismissing them - I’ll attempt to answer your original question as openly as I can.
= = = =
Simply put, as others have pointed out, it does not make sense to cover up already excavated ruins. They have already been disturbed and for us to cover them up now would just further degrade them. We have already contaminated them with our world and if we bury them now and someone else uncovers them a thousand years from now would just confuse future archaeologists. It would be like us uncovering a ruin of something that the Romans had uncovered, disturbed and buried a thousand years ago … all we would see is that they did something for some reason, buried it and left it … we have no way of seeing what they did, what they found, why or what context - all of that previous knowledge of what was there is now lost, unless someone wrote about it all.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/29/pompeii-still-has-buried-secrets
About a third of the ancient city has yet to be excavated, however; the consensus among scholars is that this remainder should be left for future archeologists, and their presumably more sophisticated technologies.
Scholarly consensus is that part of the city should stay buried. There are all sorts of concerns about visitors damaging Pompeii. That article is full of them. During World War Two, a group of allied soldiers thought Pompeii was a nazi encampment and shot at it. Nobody wants Pompeii to fall into further ruin.
Sure, leaving the rest to future excavation might make sense… But we already fucked up the portion we dug up… Reburying it will just fuck it up even more.
Will it fuck it up more than, say, acid rain caused by excess CO2 in the atmosphere? Or soldiers in WWIII thinking it’s an enemy camp? Or just regular looters and vandals and tourists?
I don’t know why you’re getting such combative and inaccurate answers, but this is an excellent question! It’s called backfilling, and it’s an extremely common practice at archaeological digs all over the world for a number of reasons.
You can’t beat the natural processes of the earth for preserving much of what is found. It must have done a good-enough job up to the point of excavation, otherwise we wouldn’t have found whatever it is we found. So it is usually more efficient, cost-effective, and functional to backfill an area that you know you’ll need to come back to later.
Excavation is inherently destructive, you can’t “repeat” the process like you can with hard science experiments, so archaeologists are encouraged and often required to preserve (meaning not dig) areas of a site for future research when we know our technologies will be improved. And if you can’t dig a whole feature properly in one season, backfilling it to preserve your progress until the next dig season is incredibly common practice.
The natural processes of sedimentation do a much better job at preserving something that has already been exposed to the elements than most of our modern techniques. So if there is an important find, it’s often easier to backfill it with clean sediment to ensure it’s still well-preserved when the researchers are ready to properly study it. Often a layer of geo-frabric is laid down under the backfilled material to mark where the area of interest starts, and so that you know you can dig quickly without worrying until you reach the fabric.
It’s harder for looters to know where to look for “treasure” when a site has been backfilled between seasons. It’s often one of the only security measures in place at sites that are under excavation year after year.
There are many other reasons for why backfilling is a pretty standard procedure at archaeological sites. I don’t know specifically if backfilling is common at Pompeii, but I’d imagine they must do it every so often. Pompeii is one of the most famous tourist sites in the world though, so it’s probably not the most representative example.
Regardless, your instinct is right, backfilling is incredibly common, and often the best way to preserve a site for the future. Don’t let the haters get you down!
