“Epica, etica, etnica, pathos”. Italian preventive archaeology under new and old forms of attack

In its heyday, Italian archaeology enjoyed a long period of world pre-eminence, including in the field of protection, thanks to a 1939 law on cultural heritage. In the meantime, many things have changed and the spirit of leadership contained in the legislation today brings more disadvantages than advantages. One of these involves an “ethical” dimension of adhering to pedagogical values belonging to Crocean idealism, no longer viable in a postmodern society. In complex societies, combining different ethical values unfortunately often results in self-referential closure -a sort of scholarly tribalism- and the methodological anarchy of Italian archaeology is representative of this. Chaos and anarchy produce vast suffering in the discipline, its “pathos”, a suffering not only of people (professionals, ministry officials, planners, contractors and technical offices), but also of archaeological heritage, the protection of which sees continuous defeat in the theatre of urban/regional planning. Ratification of the Malta Convention by the Italian government and the proposal of legislation in line with European archaeology (which integrates the principle of “the polluter pays” in a vision of a compliance-driven or development-led archaeology) are essential requirements for a field which must recover lost ground by formulating a new and successful approach to the discipline