ABSTRACT
Why are historic artefacts and monuments sometimes deliberately destroyed, and under what conditions are they carefully preserved? To the archaeologist, artefacts and monuments are chiefly significant as a kind of archive, evidence of past human activity. Preservation allows the archive to be consulted whenever new questions about the past are generated. This is only one way of understanding the material traces of the past, however, and one which is deeply embedded in those conditions of Western modernity that gave birth to the archaeological discipline.
