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...
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.
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!
The reason people are being combative and spewing misinformation while calling me an idiot is that I'm nonbinary. Remember when a woman would put forward a scientific opinion, and every man in the room would contradict her even if she's right, because women aren't supposed to do science? It's the same for nonbinary people. My gender means people can't take me seriously in a scientific discussion, no matter what right or wrong are. I have to be called an idiot for having an opinion in the first place. What I'm "supposed" to do is say "Thank you for educating me, you smart boys" so they can feel superior. If I pushback, then it's okay to call me high or stupid for daring to disagree with a man.
You never mentioned you were nonbinary. Isn't it possible that people were being contrarian without being transphobic?
People can tell on a subconscious level. It's all in the mannerisms and cultural subtleties. "You didn't notice, but your brain did"
There you go again, dismissing my opinion because a nonbinary person said it. I'm nonbinary and I have opinions, so they must be wrong. You don't even bother to invent a reason to disagree, you just dismiss me out of hand. I'm not even worth your time to invent an excuse to take me unseriously.
No, I actually thought you were joking. I think people are pretty ordinary and can't telepathically tell that stuff in text. I bet you can't deduce my gender, orientation, race, hair color, and name. I assume this because I didn't tell you any of these things.
Poe's law, so hard right now. I actually assume everyone on Lemmy is a man until they say otherwise, because Lemmy is tech people and tech is sadly like that.
I don't talk like a man, and I don't talk like a woman. People are only used to hearing men and women talk. That's the scope of their experience talking to human beings. Which means that I don't sound human. I sound like some kind of bizarre alien intelligence. It's scary for these people.
Most people on lemmy, reddit, etc just assume you're a man until you say otherwise. It constantly happens to me, a woman.
I hate to break it to you, but you sound just like every gendered person on the planet. No difference in the way you speak on here from men or women.
You're also a fool, because you think that you can perceive all subconscious influences on your mind. That's the opposite of what subconscious means.
You're making an assertion that people can identify specific personal details over text, but somehow we still need to use a /S to identify sarcasm because text doesn't convey tone or body language. That requires some pretty heavy backup.
Yes, you are being ridiculed unfairly. No, I don't think it's because you are neurodivergent or non-male. As far as I can tell, there is 0 evidence to suggest that people are targeting you for your identity. They're literally just assholes.
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.
= = = =
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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 Pompéi 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
Oh, you're a lemmy.world user. That explains why you didn't read the article. You guys hate reading
I suppose if that information is stored on a single drive without redundancy, and that drive can't be copied for some weird reason, then I suppose we've already failed so hard that burying the city back up might sound like an ok idea.
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.