20th September 2013, 09:01 AM
Tool Wrote:Something else the 'preserve in situ' brigade also rather short-sightedly forget is that we are laying down yet more archaeology every single day. In 100 or 500 or 1000 years time most of the landscape we recognise today will be changed dramatically and irreversibly. Future archaeologists will have more than enough to contend with without all that lovely prehistoric stuff that is slowly dissolving into nothingness. Think of that road being taken out by Stonehenge. Today it's a blot on an historic landscape. Sometime in the future it'll be part of the puzzle of 20th - 21st century life, it will be part of an historic landscape in it's own right. To my mind it is far better to investigate what we can now, even with whatever possible limitations there are to our methods, rather than risk it being lost forever both to the obvious deterioration by natural and human processes, and to the ever-increasing overburden of 'new' archaeology.
Have been eyeing-up the middle of a roundabout on an up-coming road scheme - it'll have a Roman road, whatever happened in the middle ages, a turnpike road, various versions of a crossroads, several early phases of a modern major trunk route and an early(ier) example of the existing roundabout, all in one little area. Bet we don't get to play with it though, it'll be deemed to have been trashed by, errr, road improvements...
