It’s too difficult to do guys! The aliens did it and we just don’t know how. As a proper Mexican migrant though I can vouch for the excellent craftsmanship. But it’s a long swim for us. I guess we could hope into the wheel well of a 737 max… But that’s not very safe and those planes are not the type that can fly to Africa…but they’re cheap! But we could just ride a boat there. So long as there’s tortillas grown locally, the aliens can build pyramids.
Need to leave sites as close to as they were as possible, else clues about the past could be accidentally destroyed, especially clues that we do not have the technology to analyze yet
True, but that still revolves around leaving it aa close as possible to how they were - preservation sometimes requiring active work to keep clues around
For the pyramids, the rate of exterior decay is probably deemed far less destructive than the need to use cement to restore the granite
I guess people want them to be fashionably ruined.
Frankly, I think re-cladding the pyramids would be great for keeping clues around, provided they don't touch the existing stones while putting new ones on. That'll stop erosion from digging deeper into the existing structure.
It makes me wonder where the cutoff is for maintaining old things. Obviously pyramids fall on the “leave it alone” side because they’re about the oldest buildings in existence, but I wonder about, say, Renaissance-era buildings.
I've seen the occasional controversy about restoring medieval castles. This one comes to mind as a particularly unusual and controversial case - the remains of the original castle were so badly degraded that there wasn't really much left, so the restorers built obviously modern-looking walls that had the original castle's fragments embedded in them held up in the correct places and shapes. Sort of like a reconstructed dinosaur skeleton where a bunch of the bones were missing.
Putting the original limestone cladding back on the pyramids would be interesting, it would probably "look fake" because the original pyramid cladding was extremely smooth and clean much like a modern concrete structure would appear. People don't expect it to look that way. Sort of like how a lot of the old marble statues and architecture from ancient Greece and Rome used to be brightly painted, but those wore off and now everyone thinks of pure white stone when they imagine what an ancient sculpture from there is supposed to look like.
Edit: In violation of the norms of social media, I read the article. The plan with the pyramid wasn't even as drastic as I thought, apparently for the pyramid that they were considering doing this to the original cladding is still available. It's just fallen off and is lying around the pyramid's base.
If you're in Europe, there's the exhibition on this topic at the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren, Belgium for a few more months, after previous stops at, among other places, the Met:
At least in some cases, they have the side-by-side comparisons you're looking for (although they obviously don't have originals of the most famous statues).
A beautiful page on a prior exhibition, with images that allow you to switch between the reconstruction and the "white" look the statues have now after millennia or decay:
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