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Preservation Sites

The present is the permanent variable that affects all efforts to recover the past. History is a means of recovering the past but it inevitably contains, selects, organizes, and interprets what it can retrieve of the past in the light of the present. Relics are also a means of recovering the past, but they too are manipulated, repaired, relocated, incomplete, out of context, and, above all, viewed by eyes that never knew the relics' present. Every example of an historic site for which any deliberate preservation effort has been made must inevitably, therefore, say as much about the present as it does about the past. Indeed, when the viewing of sites and artifacts takes place unaided by much knowledge of history, or of the specific relic, they must say more about the present than they do about the past. As historical research grows and the means of accessing the historical past and disseminating information increase, relics become less important as means of recovering the past. Yet, despite their lesser importance in this respect, movements to conserve monuments, sites, and artifacts of the past have increased in the twentieth century. This has occurred, in large part, because only "artifacts are simultaneously past and present" and they lend themselves, therefore, to far more flexible, multiple, and immediate interpretations than the accumulated data of history does (Lowenthal 248).

Any serious historical account must offer a plausible interpretation that gets its facts right and is presented convincingly by means of carefully organized argument. Valid interpretations can be diametrically opposed to each other, but historians' conclusions will be always tested against what is known, and judged by how they conform to methodological constraints. Thus, serious scholarly history--and even most popular history--has no audience unless it is, in these senses, sound. A relic, on the other hand, is present and can be, and often i...

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Preservation Sites. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 07:30, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690233.html