Amateur Archaeologists in England discover a 6 meter mosaic, the Most exciting in Britain, and what do the experts do?
Can the archeologists on the board explain this action?
IANAA but I’ve read of this being done elsewhere. It’s to protect the mosaic. To remove the mosaic and preserve it would mean finding a building and all the ancilliaries and considerable expense. It’s much more cost-effective to just re-cover the thing while they figure out the next steps.
How do they judge “most exciting?” Does this mean that previously discovered British Roman mosaics are Dull? Or at least Duller than this one?
Maybe they could rate excitingness on a scale, say in Spielbergs or something.
I will grant that Bellerophon Fighting a Chimera is arguably pretty exciting. Bellerophon doesn’t get as much press as he deserves. They adapted the story from Wrath of the Titans, substituting Perseus for Bellerophon*. It’s the only time I can recall the story making it to the Big Screen.
*I don’t have a problem with this. I argue in my book that the Bellerophon vs. Chimera story is a local variant of the Perseus vs. Cetus story, and both are represented by the same constellations.
Amateurs are the wrong people to discover anything. Of use for digging and for cataloguing pot shards, but only highly trained professionals can touch a discovered item or breathe near it otherwise dreadful things will happen and everything will be spoilt forever by clumsy uncomprehending brutish amateurs who did not go to college and spend years in the disciplines needed. Thus it has been since 400 BC when the first archaeological degree was issued by Mud University and greedy looting amateurs were just digging up stuff they found because they liked it. They should always have just left the things in the ground forever to preserve the historical record.
worked in an archaeological office
Geez, the Smithsonian’s advertisements have touched the bottom of the barrel…
If you read it as “I had a ‘most exciting’ afternoon at Stamford Bridge”; it will make more sense to you.
Harold Godwinson wasn’t complaining.
I suspect the “most exciting” referred to the size and completeness of the mosaic and the quality of the art. If I’m reading the article correctly, the amateur archaeologists were under the supervision of professionals at all times. The project plans to come back and excavate the rest of the mosaic, as well as other parts of the site, so expect more pictures in the future.
Think of the sense “a most exciting” rather than “the most exciting.”
The quote from the Guardian in context:
Oh, well then, I stand corrected.
Realistically, everything we’ve ever done archaeologically is basically a sin. By the standards of 2200, clearly the right answer will be advanced radar and other such technologies, to non-invasively find and catalogue every single thing underground, in a book, in a painting, etc. Every decade or two, someone can come along with a similar device with higher pixel density and rescan everything for better resolution.
All of the structures and texts will be discovered via 3D simulation of the environments scanned.
And they’ll still be explaining any unknown object by saying it had religious significance.
The figure of ‘the last fifty years’ was presumably not just plucked at random. I suspect that what he actually means is that this is the most exciting mosaic discovery made in Britain since that at Hinton St Mary 54 years ago.