Ahh yes, so the future generations of archaeologists have a Pompeii to uncover
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…
No McDonalds but there is a Buy’N’Large Mega Mall that covers 50% of it.
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.
You can’t just cover things back up. Archaeological digs have been slowly buried over time in environmental conditions that allowed for their preservation, or in Pompeii’s case, initially very quickly and then slowly. Covering it back up would not only ruin the discovery potential of future investigation that relies on identification by context (for example, dating a pot by the chemical composition of the surrounding and previously contained materials, but it would also endanger anything we’ve found by introducing an uncontrolled and entirely new environment. It’s not like we can layer on the ash and other stuff in the same order it was deposited and in the exact same location with the same chemical composition.
Conservation is a necessary and very active effort as soon as something is found, because the act of studying it aleays causes at least some initial destruction.
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?
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.
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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.
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.
Define “done”.
This. There will always be new things to learn or new students to teach. It’s a time capsule, it will never be covered up and should never be covered up.
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