Pitlamp
Well-known member
It's reassuring to know that the bulk of Mel's samples were retained for others to study, thereby removing the need to take more stals from caves.
Yes, even as late as the 1970s, attitudes to cave conservation were still quite different from how they are today. The results of Mel's work are fascinating but I always wondered about the justification for removal of so many. That was a part of the motivation for our developing a technique for obtaining a small sample from the centre / base of stalagmites by a two stage drilling technique designed to avoid contamination of the sample by younger drilling dust from nearer the start of the hole. This minimally invasive method was first applied to the Jockey's Cap stalagmite in Ingleborough Cave (with full permissions, obviously). It gave pretty good results and you'd be hard pressed even to see the drilling point nowadays. There's a paper about it somewhere in C&KS. (Langcliffe will be fully aware of the above; the detail is just posted here for anyone else interested.)
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Hannah - your question above is a good one. I think, as with the early stages of any area of human exploration or study, techniques and safeguards weren't well evolved. I suspect that collection of samples to examine in the comfort of a warm building rather than a damp cave, perhaps avoiding having to take sensitive equipment such as microscopes underground, would have seemed logical. Later, as such studies became more refined, the undesirability of stal removal would have become increasingly recognised. I'm reminded of many Victorian "archaeologists" who were basically just collectors. They emptied certain important sites (e.g. Victoria Cave, 2nd half of 19th Century) seemingly without realising that when artefacts are removed from context their value is greatly diminished. Compare that with the modern approach, whereby archaeologists are reluctant to disturb anything unless a site is threatened by major developments (e.g. a road being built). In that situation they will do a "rescue dig" to try to recover and record what information they can before the site is destroyed completely. Their principle is that future archaeologists will have better techniques and thus obtain more information, bearing in mind that a site can only be disturbed once before future opportunities are lost. Increasingly, geophysical techniques are being used to "see" what there is underground without having to disturb it. (I'm not an archaeologist but the above is my understanding of the modern approach.)
Yes, even as late as the 1970s, attitudes to cave conservation were still quite different from how they are today. The results of Mel's work are fascinating but I always wondered about the justification for removal of so many. That was a part of the motivation for our developing a technique for obtaining a small sample from the centre / base of stalagmites by a two stage drilling technique designed to avoid contamination of the sample by younger drilling dust from nearer the start of the hole. This minimally invasive method was first applied to the Jockey's Cap stalagmite in Ingleborough Cave (with full permissions, obviously). It gave pretty good results and you'd be hard pressed even to see the drilling point nowadays. There's a paper about it somewhere in C&KS. (Langcliffe will be fully aware of the above; the detail is just posted here for anyone else interested.)
.......................................................................................
Hannah - your question above is a good one. I think, as with the early stages of any area of human exploration or study, techniques and safeguards weren't well evolved. I suspect that collection of samples to examine in the comfort of a warm building rather than a damp cave, perhaps avoiding having to take sensitive equipment such as microscopes underground, would have seemed logical. Later, as such studies became more refined, the undesirability of stal removal would have become increasingly recognised. I'm reminded of many Victorian "archaeologists" who were basically just collectors. They emptied certain important sites (e.g. Victoria Cave, 2nd half of 19th Century) seemingly without realising that when artefacts are removed from context their value is greatly diminished. Compare that with the modern approach, whereby archaeologists are reluctant to disturb anything unless a site is threatened by major developments (e.g. a road being built). In that situation they will do a "rescue dig" to try to recover and record what information they can before the site is destroyed completely. Their principle is that future archaeologists will have better techniques and thus obtain more information, bearing in mind that a site can only be disturbed once before future opportunities are lost. Increasingly, geophysical techniques are being used to "see" what there is underground without having to disturb it. (I'm not an archaeologist but the above is my understanding of the modern approach.)
