What excites us about the past is being there: feeling the heat as we climb a Mexican pyramid; adjusting our eyes to the light in the Pantheon; watching the paint peel off the walls of Tutankhamun's tomb. Peeling paint? If, in the brief, crushed tour of the Egyptian boy-king's rooms at Luxor we don't actually see it happen, we can certainly return later and note the damaging spread of holes and spots. Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, has had enough of it. He promises that the tomb, and two others, will close by the end of the year. To keep tourists happy, he has commissioned a replica.
It won't be the first. You can already see one in Las Vegas: until recently, Tut's tomb graced the Luxor Las Vegas Hotel, filled with replica treasures. Now it has been installed in the city's Museum of Natural History. So will the Valley of the Kings become a Las Vegas Strip, more tat than Tut? Is there no other way?
There can be no disputing the problem. Howard Carter emptied Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, leaving four rooms cut from the rock, one of them covered in paintings. It was recognised immediately that the sterile environment had been compromised: Carter's chemist found "air-infections" the day after they broke in. Those were nothing, however, compared with the humidity, fungi and dust wafted through the tomb by a thousand or more visitors a day. Cue staining, crumbling and erosion of the paint. Short of sand-blasting it, you would be hard pushed to devise a more efficient mechanism for destroying the 3,300-year-old art.
The problem affects ancient sites around the world. The ice age painted caves at Lascaux in south-western France were closed in 1963 and a facsimile opened nearby 20 years later. Stonehenge was closed to visitors in 1977, to save shallow carvings from wear. Easter Islanders would like to restrict tourists for fear of damage to the statues there. Heritage tourism may be good for economies but, badly managed, it harms the heritage. It's right that our access should be controlled.
The great thing about Tutankhamun's tomb will be the replica's quality. Technology means that a copy now can be visually indistinguishable from the original; and you can see it with better lighting and access. Indeed, the replication process is so precise, it brings new insights to the original, helping academics and tour guides alike. No, it's not the real tomb. But it is a real facsimile, and when you visit you will become part of a cutting-edge research project. Before, you were just a pan scourer.
Mike Pitts is editor of British Archaeology