
Archaeologists chase melting ice in Yellowstone to collect artifacts - diodorus
http://www.wyofile.com/column/archaeologists-chase-melting-ice-in-yellowstone-to-collect-artifacts/
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ChuckMcM
So don't they get grief from other players for camping the spawn points? :-)

More seriously though I see the evidence that humans have lived through large
variations in climate throughout their existence and it makes me want to build
a domed city. If you started right now how much could you build? How
independent could you make it? How many replacement parts? A lot of dystopic
scenarios have people scrambling to survive with systems where the underlying
support structure has been destroyed, how difficult would it be to build a
self supporting community while the systems are working as designed? A decade?
A century?

The folks who build houses into the ground in New Mexico call them "Earth
Ships", of course the dome project was ridiculed, but rather than take the
position of exchanging no air with the rest of the world, how close could you
get to self sufficiency?

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JoeAltmaier
Ends with the usual admonition: don't collect or move artifacts if you find
them in a National Park. Note their location and report.

Yet the theme of the article is, that artifacts are disappearing daily, there
are not enough professionals to manage them all, and irreplaceable history is
lost daily. So the admonition seems pointless; even counterproductive!

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nathancahill
More history is lost to private display cases than to natural causes. Leaving
artifacts and reporting their location is certainly not counterproductive.

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JoeAltmaier
Read the article? Its not true in this case. The artifacts are wood, grass,
maybe cloth and melting ice rots them away in a season. It would be no
different here, if you were to take the item, and report its location as well.
Then at least the artifact still exists somewhere.

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nathancahill
There's an order of magnitude more value for archaeology in an artifact's
context than in the artifact itself. A 5000 y/o piece of wood is just a piece
of wood once it's been taken out of it's context.

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JoeAltmaier
And what is it worth, once its rotted away and gone? What if you are the last
person available to save that artifact? Should you let it rot, because
Authority says to?

Rather than scold folks for saving artifacts, rather teach them how to
preserve some context - pictures, date, GPS location. Something. Else its
_all_ gone.

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nathancahill
I agree with you in principal, but we're talking about a national park with
3M+ visitors a year. The public position has to be to leave artifacts where
they are found.

