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Should archaeologists cover Pompeii back up when they're done with it? (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[–] 44 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    I think the last part of your question is the most relevant to this conversation ...

    .... are you just high fam?

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  • [+] [S] -48 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You realize that there's more than one hard drive involved in preserving important information. Right? Of course you also realize that people in charge of preserving important information are also aware of the limitations and lifespan of the medium they use for storage, and have plans in place to overcome those challenges.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Suppose that, for one reason or another, that the people preserving said information died 500 years ago, and nobody alive understands how our current technology works. Should future civilizations' understanding of Pompeii be entirely reliant on a bunch of degraded old hard drives, or should they have a variety of options to learn what happened?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    Did we just jump 500 years into the future, or progress through time naturally, where people update records according to changes in society and technology?

    I get what you're saying, but we still have records older than Pompeii itself, and recording methods weren't even a fraction as good as they are today. If covering the site back up adds another layer of preservation, then by all means. But we can't recreate the conditions that preserved it so well to begin with. I think the experts know what they're doing.

    One reason that I personally think might be a good reason to cover it back up is because it's essentially a mass grave. People were frozen in time, doing whatever they were doing when the eruption occurred. It might be respectful to the dead to leave them there.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    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.

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  • [–] [S] -3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [+] [S] -20 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Looters and vandals of a millennia old ruin full of nothing but destroyed lives? Acid rain will cause damage but I believe our concern should be stopping that, not worrying about what it will destroy..

    Regarding soldiers, hopefully war never touches Italia again and the chance of PompΓ©i being bombed in a modern war is fairly low. We know where it is and the Geneva conventions list military actions on world heritage sites to be a war crime, no nation who recognizes that convention will intentionally target the ruins

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  • [+] [S] -36 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Oh, you're a lemmy.world user. That explains why you didn't read the article. You guys hate reading

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Just refuting the idiocy you commit to writing

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  • [+] [S] -23 points 2 years ago

    The workmen of that era, upon finding a mansion or other building, would extract any objects of obvious value, such as marble statues, bronze lamps, and decorative mosaics, without taking note of their location or of the architectural context

    Alcubierre operated with barbaric efficiency, especially when it came to wall paintings that his workers hacked off from their brick underpinnings. When a painting was deemed insufficiently different from those already unearthed, workmen pulverized it underground. These excavations were focussed on finding masterpieces to augment royal or aristocratic collections, rather than on discovering the mundane objects of everyday lifeβ€”or material evidence of the complexities of Roman social structures.

    In late 2010, a stone building known as the House of the Gladiators imploded after heavy rains, severely damaging valuable frescoes inside. That disaster was followed by the collapse elsewhere in the city of several other walls.

    Like I said, .world users can't read. It was right there in front of you, and you preferred to throw around ableist insults instead of using your eyes.

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