Monday, October 30, 2006

Priorities

Twisty mocks the rush to restore a brothel at Pompey, but the snark sort of comes off the story when you realize that priceless ancient texts are being left to moulder for lack of funds for real (read, non-titilating) archaeology... Sigh.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your link doesn't work.

I am curious how this isn't real archeology. As someone who knows more than one person driven into sex work (what we transgender peeps call survival sex) - why aren't their lives worthy of documenting? Are they that devalued that preserving one instance of their existence is anathama?

'Cause archelogy isn't about how people actually lived - it's only about preserving the lives of those society values. And it sure ain't the powerless.

ACM said...

link worked just now -- have you been on the internet before? sometimes there are glitches...

as to the substantive point, sure, all parts of society are worth understanding. however, one gets the impression that the choice to fully restore a pleasure palace full of juicy mosaics while abandoning a treasure trove of scholarship indicates that the motives may have more to do with lucrative tourism than with interest in the plight of the downtrodden (and, in fact, the oppressed lives of the sex slaves are rather minimized in favor of the fun bits about what they offered to customers)...