Certainly the National Park Service and other agencies have
had to face the problem of ruins in the American Southwest
where so many great examples exist, e.g.Mesa Verde, Chaco,
etc. The Romantic attachment to such things is also
significant throughout time (see Rose Macaulay's The Pleasure
of Ruins, David Lowenthal also has some neat stuff on this
with great quotes in The Past is a Foreign Country.
But as archaeologists we should remember its metaphorical
power in describing the processes of how sites are made and
how philosophy enters our discipline. On the preservation
side it must get some weight(stabilization of ruins) in the
management of our cultural patrimony.
DGOrr