18 Jun
2009
18 Jun
'09
12:45 p.m.
blstuart at bellsouth.net wrote:
I'm certainly no archeologist, but one of the
things that
I've noticed in documentaries is that something has changed
in the practice of archeology when compared to say 100
years ago. Now if something cannot be done without
some degree of assurance that the change will not be
harmful (e.g. cleaning, repairing, etc), then it's just not
done. Instead the piece is kept until some future time
when the techniques and technology allow it to be
cleaned or repaired without any damage to the history.
The Antikythera mechanism would seem a pertinent example of that. If people had
attempted to dismantle it back when it was discovered, rather than leaving it
alone, I think it unlikely we would have learned what we have since, through
the modern nuclear-imaging techniques that have been applied to it.