The Protection of Archaeological Monuments?

Once again archaeological conservation is in the throes of institutional transformations, which in 2002 involved offices and institutions associated with the protection of cultural heritage. The protection of archaeological monuments has been, for all practical purposes, excluded from the tasks of government administration, which included the Office of the General Conservator of H istorical Monuments, liquidated on 31 March 2002. Its fate was shared by the Centre for Salvage Archaeological Research and the Department of Archaeology at the Centre for the Documentation of Historical Monuments. Today, the protection of archaeological monuments is the domain of the newly established Centre for the Protection of Archaeological Heritage which, in its capacity as a cultural institution outside the structure of government administration, has been entrusted with extremely responsible tasks stemming from the regulations of the binding statute about the protection of cultural property and acts of international law, supervision over the Service of the Protection of Historical Monuments entailing the p ro tection of archeological monuments, current inventories, the documentation and assessment of the state of the preservation of monuments and tackling the challenges of an epoch of the domination of digital techniques, in which the usefulness of archaeological archives will be decided by the degree of their accessibility with the help of modern information instruments