In which Doris muses on the best things to do with a country full of ruins.
Turkey, Greece and now Mexico have a problem with ruins. They have too many of them.
And that is not necessarily a problem. After all, when every city wants to be the International City of Culture and every Museum worth capitalising wants to have a wide range of exhibits, it’s useful to have some more graves to rob, sorry, artefacts to exhume and study.
But for your earnest Seekers After Knowledge this can pose a problem on a cultural tour, which is that you get Ruined Out. (AFR was an abbreviation that our Exodus tour group invented years ago when we were in Turkey, standing for Yet Another Ruin, or something like that.) Mayan Mexico is particularly well endowed, with nearly 30 different sites shown on our A3-sized tourist map of the Yucatan peninsula, and many of the sites being large cities which extend well beyond the central area that the archaeologists have harvested – sorry, explored. In fact having been shown a couple of still-tree-covered pre-archaeologist buildings in Palenque, Sid and Doris have developed an eye for a large pile of limestone rubble and now most of the countryside looks suspiciously terraformed.
So – you dig it up, you pile up some of the original stones, you take the interesting bits to exhibit in museum 59b, you put a tidy little thatched roof over any carvings that have survived which nobody else wants, you make some diagrams and some information boards and a ticket booth and a slightly optimistically large car park, and you end up with a lawned site that’s going to take quite a bit of mowing.
And then groups of tourists come round, and the guides explain earnestly about the Pre-Classic, Classic and Post-Classic periods, and how the buildings are aligned with the sun and the seasons, and how some buildings were definitely used for rituals because the archaeologists can’t work out whether they could ever be used for anything practical, and the tourists listen to a bit of it with a slightly glazed look and climb up onto your carefully-piled up stones until you put up notices asking them not to.
Is there room for another approach? Could you actually reconstruct a site, with vividly-painted stucco and priests, shops (commercial opportunity!), restaurants/hotels (ditto) and people dressed up in costumes (costume hire ditto)?
Meanwhile some industrious people have created virtual reconstructions, and on the grounds that one stepped-sided flat-topped pyramid can look remarkably like another (despite Mildred’s best efforts to tell us otherwise), here is a reconstruction of Uxmal: