"Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race. … Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert, spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples."
So wrote religious scholar Alcuin of York in the late eighth century in a letter to Ethelred, king of Northumbria in England. He was describing a violent raid by Vikings on a monastery in present-day Scotland.
It is no wonder that the Vikings have a reputation for mindless savagery. Since the Vikings were unable to write, much of their history was recorded by British and French clergy—the very people who fell victim to the Viking raids.
High Museum Turnout Forces Tombs' Closure
NEW YORK - Unexpectedly high visitor interest has forced the Metropolitan Museum of Art to close two Egyptian tombs that were opened for unrestricted viewing last month.
The museum had removed protective glass screens from the tombs of Raemkai and Perneb Jan. 29, allowing visitors full views of interior limestone carvings for the first time in 90 years.
This is the continual problem in Egypt: the tombs being in visitors; the visitors' mere presence is degrading the tombs; eventually there will be nothing left to look at.
It's one of those paradoxes of archaeology. The reason why things survive from thousands of years ago is that they have been sealed away from human contact. The ground is, after all is said and done, a very safe place for artifacts to be (as well as inaccessible caves or their analogs, tombs). The tombs of Egypt were largely preserved for so long because they were either sealed up and inaccessible or choked with debris and similarly inaccessible. The paintings remained stable because the environment within the tombs was fairly stable. Once they were opened to the outside and people came in with their body heat and moisture-laden breath, the decorations began to decay rapidly.
A similar situation evolved in France with the Paleolithic cave paintings. In that case, the caves containing the paintings were largely sealed off from public view to protect them. This is, of course, somewhat controversial. Nobody denies that unfettered access to these things would be damaging, but it does put archaeologists in something of an elitist position controlling access to what is generally regarded as the patrimony of the human race as a whole. This occurs again and again within archaeology and is something worth considering in depth. Which I will not do here.
And in a similar vein. . .Reading between Peru's Nazca Lines
Tourists, grave robbers, tractor trailers leaving their mark
NAZCA, Peru (AP) -- Standing inside the maze of mysterious lines and figures that put this arid region on the tourist map, state archaeologist Alberto Urbano surveys a football field-sized spread of ankle-deep trash.
"Farther down this road there are illegal gold mines, too," he says, noting the path actually is the side of a giant trapezoid. "See how straight it is."
But not just trash and small-time gold diggers threaten Peru's fragile Nazca Lines. Grave robbers, tractor trailers and tourists have left their mark on the mammoth designs carved more than a millennium ago along a 35-mile stretch of desert.