Archaeology

When I was young I wanted for a while to be an archaeologist. But I wonder now about the legitimacy of the entire enterprise. First of all, a lot of it is grave-robbing, and the rest is mostly digging through someone else's garbage. Isn't that pretty disrespectful of our fellow human beings?

And do we learn anything justifying this? From all I've seen, we get nothing out of it all but wild guesses. Worse, every archaeological dig is destructive. We are cleaning out all the eras between the present and the time we happen to be interested in, and so losing the evidence of these other times. In Greece, we always dig down to the classical, Periclean period, discarding the Byzantine, the Ottoman, the Roman. We happen to be interested these days in the Periclean period; what happens if, twenty or a thousand years from now, we are instead interested in the Ottoman? Too late; we've destroyed all the evidence with our digging.

Even if we are still interested in the Periclean times, it is quite likely that our evidence is now being damaged by archaeological techniques that, in a hundred years, will seem terribly primitive and inadequate.