Animaterra - I agree with you. The past is there to be plundered and re-used in modified form, we see and hear this all around us, in music, in art, in architecture, in literature. We live in an age where we value the past, perhaps overvalue it. We live in a tme where music over 250 years old - and I'm thinking of Bach, Handel, Mozart et al - is considered the pinnacle of Western civilisation, yet 50years after the deaths of the above mentioned, nobody performed their music. They went out of fashion. Times and attitudes change but as long as the past exists in some accesible form, written or recorded for example, we can always study it and raid it and use it for our own purposes. At present there is a lot cross-cultural plundering going on with "Folk"musicians and bands taking on board inluences from so-called World Music - music from cultures alien to their own. This is just another fashion in music. The search for novelty goes on.