All right, fine, mr detail-oriented :rolleyes::D.
You can bet your sweet little arse we would have chopped up the doors of the Forbidden City to expose them in some 1903 World Fair if we’d had the means to colonize China for real, though.
For sure.
I have some sympathy for the OP’s point of view having travelled to Egypt and China this year.
In China I was told, (if you trust the comments of a tour guide) that they had stopped digging up more Terracotta Warriors because they didn’t have the technology to preserve them yet. When first unearthed, the warriors’ paints are bright but they can’t stop it fading.
In Egypt my partner and I were having continual discussions about the preservation of artefacts. They have soooo many, there are huge areas of pieces sitting out in the elements that are unconnectable with their right place. The museum is full of stuff (yes, there is a new museum being built … but soooo much stuff!!). We saw children climbing over sarcophagi, tourists could touch and gasp breathe on so many things that must be decaying. Once again they have problems with paint fading.
I also struggled with the idea of digging up people’s graves. Whilst I don’t believe in an afterlife where you need a gold mask, they did … who am I to encourage taking it from them?!
Another issue (coming from a country without such extensive building history) was which layer do you preserve? They were removing a Roman ruins built on top of Ancient Egyptian ones - yet we view the Romans as being “old” and significant too. This also links to preservation of castles/houses in Europe - they all evolved over time … which era do you restore to? Elizabethan? Middle Ages? Roman? Prehistoric?!!
Still waiting on an answer to post #78…
Resources are fungible (within themselves) and there are potentially more out there, beyond Earth, to get.
There may be only one example of something in history that has lasted through to today, one single chance to discover that the Ancient Greeks had specialty earthenware for wiping your ass with, but that the material is too similar to regular dirt to prompt an archaeologist to stop using their digger tool and separate the lump out, and now that one chance to learn this is gone. Irretrievably gone. You can’t go to Mars and get more. There were never Greeks on Mars. That was the one sample that has lasted to modern day and we’ll never even know that we destroyed it and that it was there to be analyzed and learned about.
If you have a solution for not causing that, then by all means propose it. But saying that we can easily foresee the imminent ability to scan things in situ, and get a full, immutable record for posterity, before we muck around with stuff is - like I said - just a matter of patience. In twenty years we’ll either determine that there are technological limitations that we can prove make that impossible, or we’ll be glad that we haven’t been destroying stuff for twenty years. Yes, that will be a bummer if it’s the former, but at least we didn’t charge ahead blind.
You may as well use the same argument for climate change. All those resources are there! They’re going to get burned up anyways! WHO GIVES A FUCK!?
Well no, we can be intelligent and foresee the chance that more CO2 in the environment, released at a rate faster than the ecosystem can deal with might cause a cataclysmic result. Maybe we should step back, impose some restrictions on ourselves, and focus less on turning coal into energy, and more on upgrading our technology so that we can operate as we want to freely, in the long-term.
That’s not being a Luddite. It’s being foreward thinking and reasonable about the likelihood of what we can foresee occurring in the future.
As I understand it, these tests are performed by putting things into a scanner. You aren’t performing a chemical reaction, you’re setting up detectors in an array near an object and recording the signals coming out of it. Which is to say, it’s doing the sorts of tests that I’m proposing, just a different range.
It’s only destructive because we’re chopping bits off of things to insert into the scanner.
Given sufficient development, you create a portable scanner that works at a distance, just the same as everything else.
And, as noted in post 30, once you have a scan that is of reasonable clarity on what all exists relative to each other, in 3D, including not just the physical objects but also the soil layers and, e.g., pigment-cum-soil layers that halo the man-made objects, it may become feasible to safely break the ground up in chunks that would preserve the layers for later analysis with future tools.
At that point, for example, you might have a pot with a two inch layer of soil around it that we believe still has pigment mixed into it. We want to preserve the layer in the hopes that later technology will be able to detect the pigments and so we would be able to reconstruct where it would have sat on the face of the pot before it leached into the soil.
But, say, we can see that the pot has shattered. Whatever pigments and paints there might be on the face of the pot and in the soil that we have preserved around it, maybe there’s a way to insert a small rod and extract a sample of the clay of the pot that would remove from the edge face of the shard, where it cracked off, and so there would be no possibility of removing the pigment. We can safely extract a bit that can’t destroy a letter that might be written on the pot, but does allow us to perform carbon dating.
This is like a surgeon trying to get into the heart. You don’t just scrape your way through the flesh, continue to scrape away at each layer of muscle, scrape and pick your way through the bone, to create a nice cuboid of void all the way down to the heart, so that you can fiddle with it. You preserve all those layers and use scanners and reason to figure out an angle of attack and a minimally invasive means to get in there and do the minimal possible damage.
I am okay with that. But it requires foreseeing what could be detected in the future and going through a series of steps to make sure that you have a good sense for what exists, where it is, what could be detected in the future that might be useful, and how to package it all up so that things which cannot currently be detected would remain in place for later generations.
You understand wrong. Both involve converting a small sample of the artefact to be studied into ions, and firing that at detectors. Complete destruction of the sample, in other words, not just “putting things into a scanner”.
Yes, you are. Ionisation is a chemical reaction.
No, it really isn’t. Complete destruction down to ions is intrinsic to the method.
Well, I guess you could still do the [sup]14[/sup]C with old-school scintillation counters (who still does that, though?), but that still involves reducing the sample to fine powder and mixing with a liquid medium. Still destruction, in other words, just not as dramatic as AMS.
And you definitely can’t do isotope analysis that way, it concerns itself with stable isotopes i.e. not radioactive at all. Mass spectrometry is the only way to do it.
So, magitech. Well, I’ve outlined why that won’t work, for at least those two essential methods of modern archaeology.
And as for you analogy - sometimes, surgeons need to use the old bonesaw.