What is it for?

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...