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One aspect of archaeology that I really find fascinating is the practice of leaving certain artifacts unexplored. The original discoverers of the scrolls tried
by bglazer 3y ago
One aspect of archaeology that I really find fascinating is the practice of leaving certain artifacts unexplored. The original discoverers of the scrolls tried to unroll a few, apparently found it was impossible without completely destroying the scroll, and then just left the rest undisturbed. Rather than pushing forward and destroying everything, they left these as a mystery for a future age. Two centuries (!!) later we can finally begin to understand these, with the aid of technology that would be utterly unthinkable to those people who very thoughtfully restrained themselves.
- dmurray 3y agoAn example of the same thing at a macro level: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-rebury-first-of-its-kind-roman-villa-180980535/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeologists-reb...
- _a_a_a_ 3y agoBigger yet by far https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_the_First_Qin_Emperor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mausoleum_of_the_First_Qin_Emp... He of the terracotta army. Not excavated yet for fear of damage, but I would so love to know...
- cameron_b 3y agoThe feeling you get when you’ve gone into one of those aircraft hanger-size buildings and then you see some of the information they’ve gotten with ground tests ( radar, mercury, etc ) is wild. The site is huge. One of the suppositions is that the main chamber contained a model of his entire kingdom, replete with rivers of mercury. So yes. Archaeology is a bit destructive, and sometimes the destruction can go both ways. Proceed with caution.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago> Rather than pushing forward and destroying everything In the early days they wouldn't have accomplished anything by pushing forward, so it doesn't take all that much restraint. I'm more impressed by people in, say, the 1990s or early 2000s. They might've had a shot but there was still too much risk, so they restrained themselves until it was a safer bet.
- gwern 3y agoYeah, I can't give the King's men much credit here. They destroyed a lot of scrolls, and it was only because they weren't getting much of anything that they stopped and abandoned excavations or focused on digging out sculptures they could show off (many now in the Getty Museum - great museum, but I did feel a bit melancholy thinking about the scrolls while I was there in 2019).
- klyrs 3y agoOn the other hand, we ground up mummies for paint to the point that we ran out and used fresher corpses to meet demand. It is a bit of miracle that they were preserved, and not just discarded.
- wayvey 3y agoWhere can I read more about this? Frankly I'm a bit surprised that I've never heard about this considering how shocking it sounds.
- klyrs 3y agoWild, isn't it? Hands down my favorite historical fact learned in 2023. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown
- aruggirello 3y agoWild? Wait until you read about people actually eating mummies and corpses https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eating-medical-cannibalism-gory-history https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/mummy-eat...
- klyrs 3y agoWow. I like aged cheese but that is a bridge too far.
- 3y ago
- tobinfricke 3y agoSimilarly, there are large sections of Pompeii, which remain unexcavated -- left for the future.
- topper-123 3y agoOne aspect of that time period is they absolutely idolized the romans. A lot of education at the time consisted of learning latin and at the same time people were well aware that only a fraction of the classical texts had been preserved. I find it very believable that they understood the significance of preserving and potentially unlocking these scrolls.