Yes, because it would be funny
Should we cover other stuff like the Sphinx and Terracotta Army too?
Explode the volcano again!
But why though?
Our records of the state of pompei are stored in computers and books, which will decay a lot faster than buried stone. In 300 years, people might get bored of Pompeii and the records could be left in disrepair, or maybe contemporary retellings of the history will have picked up a lot of falsehoods due to natural drift. And this is to say nothing of the possibility of society collapsing due to climate change.
If Pompeii is buried, then in 1000 years archeologists can go check for themselves if the information they have is accurate. Just like we did.
Do you think there is 1 copy of a book on Pompeii and a single hard drive? Your idea makes sense to my high cousin. So are you just high fam?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/29/pompeii-still-has-buried-secrets
About a third of the ancient city has yet to be excavated, however; the consensus among scholars is that this remainder should be left for future archeologists, and their presumably more sophisticated technologies.
Scholarly consensus is that part of the city should stay buried. There are all sorts of concerns about visitors damaging Pompeii. That article is full of them. During World War Two, a group of allied soldiers thought Pompeii was a nazi encampment and shot at it. Nobody wants Pompeii to fall into further ruin.
I think the last part of your question is the most relevant to this conversation …
… are you just high fam?
Hard drives don’t last 20 years, and even then, there can be an unforeseen event that can render those drives inoperable. Preserving the original site would just be another form of redundancy.
You can’t just cover things back up. Archaeological digs have been slowly buried over time in environmental conditions that allowed for their preservation, or in Pompeii’s case, initially very quickly and then slowly. Covering it back up would not only ruin the discovery potential of future investigation that relies on identification by context (for example, dating a pot by the chemical composition of the surrounding and previously contained materials, but it would also endanger anything we’ve found by introducing an uncontrolled and entirely new environment. It’s not like we can layer on the ash and other stuff in the same order it was deposited and in the exact same location with the same chemical composition.
Conservation is a necessary and very active effort as soon as something is found, because the act of studying it aleays causes at least some initial destruction.
