I get the wish to preserve but I don’t understand why burry it back? Why not encase it in a temperature/climate controlled structure? I’ve seen plenty archaeological digs like this. Is it due to money or why?
Damage comes in many forms and temperature/climate controlled rooms only prevent a certain kind of damage.
The ancient city of Palmyra was irreparably destroyed by Isis in 2015. No amount of climate control would have protected it from the explosive charges that destroyed it.
Reburying sites like these will better protect them from deliberate damage and incidental damage from wars and such. Archaeologists deal with a timescale that often can’t assume political stability of the area where they dig stuff up. It’s better to not assume that future generations will pay the electric bill to keep the site preserved.
The soil itself also contains information. Not disturbing that unless necessary will let future archaeologists with better technology extract more information.
Also, I'm guessing that the sand encasing the site is a temperature/climate controlled structure when buried properly. No sunlight and no air, for starters.
That's a valid argument against ever performing any dig whatsoever, since it's always true that future archeologists might have better technology to extract more information from anything you find.
Exactly right. This is a question that archaeologists are always supposed to ask before digging. If there's a justification for having the answer now (like an immediate research need or a threat to the site), then excavation may proceed. Even then, you excavate as little as you need as nondestructively as possible. Usually that'll be a single trench/pit you excavate with hand tools and re-cover when you're finished.
Most regions have databases full of known sites that are unexcavated because there's never been a justification for digging.
I suspect the missing bit of context here is that we have a lot more potential sites than that we have archaeologists with the time and budget to investigate all of them.
So in programmer terms, most potential sites never make it out of the priority queue
Catch-22: since future archaeologists have better technology, no digs are performed right now—thus archaeological technology is not needed, and there is no pressure to improve it.
They had radar and geomagnetic mapping back in the 1990s, at least - Time team did ~250 digs that were broadcast on channel 4 and are now all on youtube, most in HD now.
And "geophysics" were used to decide what and where to dig in most of them. They're making new episodes now, as well.
Compared to a fully equipped and financed archeology team from today, which is not the case. Those who discovered the site know they are underequipped and underfunded for the specific site. In this case, reburying is cheap and effective.
This. This stuff happens all the time. So there is a new construction planned somewhere, workers accidentally find some walls etc. Archeological team is dispatched, they remove much more ground, as much as to see how big the object(s) are, what era, figure out they have a archeological gold mine. But they don't have resources (money) allocated for it yet, so they will rebury it. Next year, or in the coming years they'll come back and do the proper excavation. And if I may add a bit sarcastically, a PhD or three.
The archeologists basically studied for the last year, what being buried in that climate and that kind of soil does to the structure. So they understand extremely well if reburying is a good idea or not.
