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 Re: New Code 225 messages | Select a forum: |
Mustard wrote: You're never going to be able to protect sites from the ravages of nature though. Surely we'll end up encasing them in glass domes if that's the route we choose to follow? I do appreciate your point, but I feel that there's a very difficult line to tread between conservation and continuing use, and I'm really not sure where that line should be drawn. That's easy, encourage people to leave as little trace of their visit as humanly possible. That's something anyone who's ever visited a friends house can understand. It's not like you go to a friends house and scatter rose petals on their bathroom floor, courtesy prevents you and from the cultural conditioning you received from birth you know that would be anti-social and likely to annoy you friends so you refrain from doing it. The accumulated effect of visitors to my friends house over the years is quite small (but would be much larger if everyone insisted on leaving their tat behind) and weighed against the cost of having no friends visiting is worth paying. The cost of loss of public interest in ancient sites by preventing all access would end up far more devestating in the future as we all know political will is directly influenced by what can be gotten away with that will not cause problems at people's doorsteps come election time. If interest in ancient sites wains they are in immediate danger given the pace of development. The price of footfall for interest is worth paying in my view. It seems logical to me that if you cultivate a similar cultural sense that leaving your bits and bobs behind at public/private places is anti-social and anti-conservation then ancient sites will suffer much less than they currently do, visitors will be more welcome by landowners and the sites will be as time has rendered them, not as we would shape them. I really don't see why a completely arbitrary belief or superstition should exempt people from an attitude of conservation of delicate archaeological sites, to me that is where you begin to have fuzzy lines. Who's to say people who believe in fairies should have practices tolerated but people who think they are healing the planet by burying crystals at the most sensitive of sites should not? Or some future cult/superstition that the stones are demons frozen that are about to thaw and so should be destroyed. Going on past treatment of ancient sites it's clear current religious or superstitious beliefs should have no exemptions given because that does indeed leave openings for a sliding scale of interpretations and 'use/abuse' of something which we all have a stake in protecting. There is no basis for saying that there is some continuity of use because we don't know what the original use was in most cases. Far from being the ancient peace-loving-environmentalist-friend-of-the-earth or Rosseau's 'noble savage', the bulk of evidence shows ancient people were more like us, exploiting resources until they were exhausted, causing environmental disasters, eating and cutting down things they supposedly regarded as sacred (I'm a great believer in actions speaking louder than words)... They might well find modern attitudes to peace and environmental issues bizarre and ridiculous and the offerings left at their sites today as offensive. We're more likely to be misusing sites today given this context. Mustard wrote: Should we prevent all access to monuments? What if we carry in a seed between the tread on our shoes that then grows to become a tree the roots of which undermine a stone? How do we determine what constitutes reasonable risk? Shades of grey again. You wouldn't let people walk over the remains of an Egyptian mummy because it is so delicate, it would have a massive impact. They are usually kept behind glass where the environment around them has little or no impact. Megalithic sites are made of sterner stuff but remain sensitive, where there is massive footfall like at Stonehenge and Avebury then this would have a larger impact than at Carrignaminny in Cork where I was told I was the first visitor in years. Stonehenge is restricted for that reason and part of Avebury was at the time of my visit. I didn't intend to go to Carrignaminny to damage the turf around it with my feet but if there was an easy and effortless way to avoid doing that then I'd have no argument for avoiding it. If there was an easy and painless way for others to lessen their impact (perhaps by bringing everything they brought back home) why can't they choose that in the social spirit of conservation? Reply | with quote |  30th June 2007ce 18:45 In reply to: Re: New Code (Mustard) |
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