Readers may have seen the news last week than a Maya temple
in Belize has been destroyed. A road-building company, looking to use the raw
materials for construction, destroyed a temple at the ancient city of Noh Mul. There
was outrage in the media – how could they so flippantly destroy archaeology in
this way?
But wait -- They are using their heritage (in an extremely
roundabout way), to further their modern economy and infrastructure. Isn’t
this, by definition, what cultural tourism is?
Is that all archaeology is nowadays – cultural tourism?
Maybe its only worth (especially in the eyes of the government, perhaps), is
the money that it contributes towards the economy. If this is true, if
archaeology takes its worth from monetary gain, then the destruction of a
temple to use its raw materials for new construction could yield greater
financial results than if the archaeology remained untouched. In this era of
financial incertitude, how well placed are we to criticise?
What about the ruins themselves – surely the point is that
they hold some intrinsic value not connected with their financial implications.
Do they? Do old rocks matter? Why should we care? Would the
world be any worse off without archaeology?
-- The answer is yes, and for two very big reasons.
1) Curiosity
Curiosity is how we learn, that I wonder if… I wonder why… moment that leads to something so much
bigger. If we stopped questioning things, humanity wouldn’t advance. And sure,
stop questioning archaeology, it’s just the past (it’s not, see point 2), but
what would go next? History? Literature? Physics?
If we start clarifying that some questioning is irrelevant,
is unimportant, then what disappears next? Without curiosity there is no human
advancement, there is nothing.
2) Modern relevance
So what? you say, why
does the past matter? We’ve all
heard the adage – those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it, but
archaeology is so much more than this. The opportunity to take part in an
excavation offers a chance to get out of the office, to be part of a team, to
do something with your hands and your body when so much of our lives are spent
at desks, at computers.
Archaeology is relevant because of what ancient man managed
to do. Just think about it – the Maya pyramid – it’s actually hard to imagine
just how many man hours would have gone into creating that structure, in a time
before JCBs and cranes, before machines. The community, and the organisation
involved in building such structures can only be described as immense, and it’s
a lesson we can learn today – how much greater things are together. There’s an infinity
of things we can still learn from the past, and there always will be, because
even if somehow we manage to dig up, to uncover everything about the past, we’ll still be able to question it,
we’ll still be curious.
Archaeology matters, that’s the most important point,
because these principles are applicable to every avenue of academic research
and intellectual curiosity – when people stop caring, stop asking questions,
that’s when humanity stops existing. The temple was important because of the
dialogue it could create, and the physical link to the past that it embodied.
That’s what we can’t allow archaeology to be destroyed – losing an archaeological
site is like death, there is no return - it's lost forever.
There are, of course, many things I have not said here about why the past is important, this is merely the tip of the iceberg, and just ask maritime archaeologists (*cough*Titanic*cough) how vast they can be...
