Accidental Destruction & Intentional Destruction. Considerations for archaeological sites and monuments

The research intends to investigate the link between accidental destruction due to natural disasters, such as earthquakes or spontaneous collapses, and intentional destruction operated by unfortunate conservation and restoration strategies. In order to conceptually embrace the buildings’ decay as inalienable, the essay aims at establishing a parallelism between what the nature has destroyed and the strategies to fix to such damage, and what has been modified or destructed, instead, by human work, often scarcely aware of the historical, value-driven and technological properties of the asset. The article will examine many archeological realities present in Asia Minor and attributable to the Roman or late Roman age, with the purpose to provide for operational examples of intervention and modification of the archeological context and to fulfill a parallelism that proposes itself as interesting critical reading of the intervention strategies.