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Originally Posted by slowburner
Well if the technical wizardry here is anything to go by...who says archaeology is all dirt and sweat.
Thinking even further into the future, I suspect a time will come when excavation will be looked back on with horror. Without doubt a technology will be developed which will give as much (if not more) information about a site, and without any form of destruction. I heard recently of a geo-physics technology which can detect the existence of buried human remains up to two hundred years old. It's something to do with the conductivity of the soil in the immediate area being altered by the decomposition of electrolytes in the corpse. |
I like that idea of using electrolytes to measure for corpse location. There was something similar a few years back in Guatemala & Honduras, where a lot of Mayan architecture and structures remain buried in jungles. They found a way of measuring a difference in folliage from outer space via - well, it seems that the stones used to builid certain structures like Tikal/Copan/Palanque use limestone (I think), and that trees and shrubs growing on old sturctures absorb more lime, thus it has some affect on Chlorophyll, so that they could utilise NASA satelites to distinguish and area of the forrest with such an affect with infrared or UV imagery or the likes, and from there they could then send out a team to probe it, as appossed to just prodding around in the dark...
I just finished a book this summer about a Henry Rawlinson deciphering Cuniform around the 1850's out in Persia and Mesopotamia... Very interesting, but when you read the descriptions of how they (his peers) dug into sites and then pryed out great sculptures with crobars to send home to museums in London & Paris... its kind of harsh to modern ears but I guess it was a different time then! .. and sometimes, they even had to cut large stone sculptures in two to make them more transportable and manageable!!!! Ouch.
However, I do like how Dr O'Kelly left a certain percentage of Newgrange unexcavated so that it would be available for future scholars and better techniques... now there's a forward thinking individual who probably would have been a technological innovator had he not passed away so young.
"I often wonder to what extent archaeology is the developer of such technologies, rather than the borrower." Absolutely, good scholars are often multi-disciplinary, so I think that you should always get a fair amount of symbiosis from talented individuals from many facets of the sciences. Also, having people from opposite polar extremes come together, helps to let people see different approaches to using devices/technology in a way or a manner in which an engineer, dentist may never have thought of and vice versa.
Must say... I've enjoyed this thread today, although, shame on me for not having discerned the football pitch that Simon.d refers to in your quoted post. I'll go back and have another look.
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