It doesn’t take an archaeologist to point out that there’s something fundamentally wrong about staging a concert on an ancient site. I was recently in Mexico City, where I saw billboards advertising a performance by British soprano Sarah Brightman set to take place on the Mayan ruin of Chichen Itza on Friday, Oct. 31. An event of this magnitude is not only disrespectful to past civilizations and historians, but it also undermines the need to preserve these structures for future generations. (That is, if we assume that the Mayan Calendar is incorrect and the world will not end in 2012.)

Billed as “El Concierto de la Piramide,” this is not the first show to take place on the 1,500-year-old temple, classified as one of the New Seven Wonders of the World and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1997, Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti sang there in front of an audience of 17,000 people, and just last year, Spanish tenor Placido Domingo followed suit with a concert that drew 6,000 spectators. That’s a lot of folks traipsing around the pre-Hispanic city. Still, organizers continue to assure the National Institute of Anthropology and History that the pyramid will be well protected. But institute investigators are insisting that “the law does not permit commercial spectacles and massive concerts in the archaeological zone.”

But from the looks of it, the show will go on. There’s already talk about bringing Elton John over next year. What do you think about using ancient sites as concert venues?