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Buried stones at Avebury.
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nigelswift
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Re: Buried stones at Avebury.
Jun 29, 2006, 16:58
there is no artistic argument that supports leaving Avebury in such a ruinous state

No, but there's an archaeological one that suggests if its going to be done it should be done only slowly. The concept of "preservation in situ" was partly developed as a response to the fact that techniques are improving logarithmically. What you did yesterday can be seen as having produced less information than you could have if you had waited until today. So if you do it today, will it be seen as irresponsible tomorrow? If you'd got your way in the sixties, the way you'd done it would now be seen as crude vandalism. Every intervention into Silbury there has ever been is now seen that way.

If you do it all today, because you'd just love to see it restored (as would I), are you being selfish and greedy, depriving the future of knowledge, much as we gobble petrol, merely because we feel like it? It's a paradox. Isn't the decent thing to erect just one or two now and have another think in 100 years? A compromise between the interests of us and those of our Gt grandchildren. An archaeological sampling exercise, destructive but not wholly.

And its not just the stones. The original sockets contain a lot of info. Putting sarsens in them will deprive the future of the chance to learn more from them than we can. This is exactly what has happened at Stonehenge. The profiles of the holes there tell a story about e.g. which side the stones were put in and in what sequence, but the story is incomplete. The sockets that might have revealed the rest of the story are full of concrete and the info. is lost forever.... We have a restored Stonhenge to look at but we destroyed part of it in the process.
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