20th September 2013, 12:18 PM
Wax Wrote:I can indeed think beyond my own life time and it scares the s... out of me. As for the next 100 years it will either be the "Culture" or something to awful to contemplate. Either way I am not sure archaeology as we know it will be relevant. If it wasn't for all those Victorian barrow diggers we would nt have modern archaeology:face-stir:
I'm not sure I understand the first part of that, but never mind. Think of it another way though, if we carry on digging sites that we could be leaving alone the already struggling museums and depositories won't be able to cope so archives will be lost. You'd have to hope that all the digging was also guaranteed to result in publications of the highest quality, which of course is impossible (there are hundreds of sites worth of stuff out there now waiting to be published that probably never will be). So if the museums can't hold the archives and there's no certainty that the results will be published promptly and well, it's probably best to leave it alone. I also don't believe the last sentence - it's like saying if it wasn't for all the shaman we wouldn't have had microsurgery. I would think the work of a few individuals who really thought about what they were doing, rather than just ripping treasure out of the ground, made far more difference.
Kevin's statement that we aren't using all of the current methods to their full capabilities, while probably true, is true of almost everything. We could have a base on Mars by now, it's not technology that stopping it, its cost, and a will to do it. By contrast, geophys is now regularly used on sites, something people could only have dreamed of 20 years ago.