Was Schliemann just an ego driven grave robber that excavated the treasures of Hissarlik to become known to the world and lavish his wife with the ancient jewelry of the Mycenae? Was Evans a man who became so mesmerized and astounded in the incredible ruins he found at Knossos that he couldn’t stop at merely restoring what he found and had to reconstruct? Or were they simply two men who did what they could given their circumstances in the era they were living. Today, there is much debate that with the inception of the digital world, there is no longer any need to reconstruct ancient ruins as Evans did on Crete. Even as far back as 2001, at the seventh annual Virtual Systems and MultiMedia Conference, experts were discussing this issue of how to use multimedia and virtual reality for conservation. The upside of using the tools of the digital age for archeological conservatism is that still images, virtual reality reconstructions, and other mass quantities of information about any given historical site around the world can be accessed by anyone one who can afford a cup of coffee at an Internet café. People of all economic levels can see far off lands from thousands of years past . The draw back is people may never have the experiential learning that one gets when they enter the corridor of the Lourve, the exhaustion of when they reach that top step of the Eiffel Tower, or standing in the same location where spectators watched gladiatorial contests at the Great Colosseum in Rome. Perhaps reconstruction of the great ancient ruins will draw more people to these sites enforcing the importance of standing in the presence of history, of greatness, of art in its purest form. Or it could cause spectators to gasp in disgust as great ruins are turned into amusement type Forest Lawn Museum.
