Rome's Subway Expansion Reveals Artifacts From The Ancient Past • Hacker News Board

Re: Rome's Subway Expansion Reveals Artifacts From The Ancient Past

#51

Post by emmelaich » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 4:38 AM UTC

Chrome Canary gives a https warning:

   NET::ERR_CERT_SYMANTEC_LEGACY
   Subject: www.npr.org
   Issuer: Symantec Class 3 ECC 256 bit EV CA - G2
   Expires on: 17 Nov 2019
   Current date: 27 Jul 2018

Re: Rome's Subway Expansion Reveals Artifacts From The Ancient Past

#52

Post by bvc35 » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

drb91 wrote: post #11

bvc35 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a damn shame.

What's the alternative--people stop developing Istanbul, Rome, etc entirely? I can't say I'm entirely unsympathetic to a population that wants development over marginally better understanding of places that already experience high levels of excavation and historical tourism.

You can develop on the property, but you should also have to pay for archaeologists to excavate the site and identify artifacts of historical value. History is too full of examples of foolish cultures of the past destroying historical artifacts because they don't like them, think they are inconvenient, think they aren't significant, or want to use them as building materials. There have been plenty of cultures who basically thought "What's the point in preserving this stuff if we know the history of this stuff?" The interest of the world to retain and understand historical evidence is more important that the interest of relatively few people to make marginally more money.

Re: Rome's Subway Expansion Reveals Artifacts From The Ancient Past

#53

Post by bvc35 » Fri, Jul 27, 2018, 5:13 PM UTC

sbov wrote: post #15

pmontra wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's valuable (think about revenues from tourism) but we still have to live our lives. The ancients built on top of anything was there before. That's why we have so many archeological layers in Rome.

It's not valuable if all they find is standard roman clay pot # 123,312 to 124,312. There was an article about this when they were building the tunnel in Istanbul. They did find some significant stuff, but the vast majority of it was stuff they already had tons of. They literally filled warehouses with the stuff, and dumped most of it back in because it was not rare or significant.

You still have to excavate it just in case you do find something unique or historically significant.