Saving the Ancient Glass Artifacts Shattered in the Beirut Explosion | Hacker News Reader

Saving the Ancient Glass Artifacts Shattered in the Beirut Explosion

atlasobscura.com

52 pointsprismatic15 comments

The idea of recovering historical items from the ground with the dual aim of learning about them and displaying them in museums has always worried me.

Clearly, leaving objects undiscovered in the ground means that we would never learn about them and also contextual knowledge about them would remain absent from the corpus of world history. Leaving objects in the ground also puts them at risk from looters so any such strategy could mean that we might never learn about them at all.

Alternatively, discovery means new knowledge learned but it's likely gained at great risk. No matter how well historical objects are stored or protected, it seems to me that over the longterm they'll always be at high risk from terrorists, political upheavals and cultural reclamation (and that on ideological grounds could ultimately lead to their deliberate destruction).

Given those factors, I have considerable doubt that objects that are now several millennia old will actually survive intact through several more millennia.

It seems to me that we need to rethink our strategies completely if we are to find ways of preserving all such objects over a truly long term.

Given the depth and breadth of history, how likely is it than all potential finds will be even remotely exhausted? And the deeper history is buried the less likely it is to ever be found, is there value in that that I’m not seeing?

I'm not an archeologist but it seems to me that so much of the past has already been lost that every find can be viewed as potentially useful in reconstructing the past - if not now then later after new tools have been developed.

There are definitely periods, sites, and cultures where we believe the majority of finds that would have existed are already lost to us from decay processes (usually modeled exponentially). An example is the category of classic mimbres black on white pottery depicting animals. This is a type of artifact that certain archaeologists would like to study and also has a high black market value. The scarcity of examples with secure provenance indicates that few remain to be found as a result of looting and relevant experts don't expect to find many more.

> It seems to me that we need to rethink our strategies completely if we are to find ways of preserving all such objects over a truly long term.

To what end? At this point if those glass artifacts aren't used as museum pieces, they're not serving any purpose at all anymore and we might as well throw them away.

You and I would likely throw those glass shards away but I doubt any archeologist would.

My concern is about how we stop such 'vandalism' in the first instance (especially so culturally significant objects such as those found by Howard Carter). We might do so initially, say for several hundred years, with current strategies with minimal loss but I think over several millennia our systems would fall apart.

(At present, we consider those objects to be of great importance, in two millennia values might be entirely different.)

In the end, we all will end up as a smear on the surface of a white dwarf.

The goal of eternal preservation will sadly fail.

Perhaps with that bleak and inevitable scenario we'd be all much better off by shooting ourselves now.

Somehow, there seems to be something intrinsic to life that prevents that from happening.

Whether that's a good or bad thing has been endlessly pondered over since the beginning of human cognition—thus the dogged persistence of religion which offers a way out of that depressing inevitability.

This is exactly why we don't know much about the Mesopotamian civilization.

And to an extent, the Indus Valley civilization and everything geographically between these regions.

There's lots of sad things happening in the world, but this one kind of got to me. We need to take good care of our historic treasures, for future generations.

Barely functioning nations are obviously the most at risk.

> It took a week for the team, under Cuyaubère’s guidance, to collect all the glass fragments on the museum’s floor. With the training that they received from Cuyaubère, the team gained a know-how that they previously lacked: being able to see the difference between the ancient glass and the modern glass of the gallery’s shelves and display cases.

Why not grab everything? I understand that a classification is important for the reconstruction, but why not just grab all the other pieces of glass anyway?

For what purpose? So they have extra work to do sorting it, putting it back together to make a piece of glass that is useless for their purpose?

They can later hire jacquesm to get a glass shards sorting machine. Something like https://jacquesmattheij.com/sorting-two-metric-tons-of-lego/ (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14226889 1264 points | April 29, 2017 | 213 comments )

This documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIoi-DSm0e4) on the restoration of Japanese pottery is an interesting comparison, both on techniques and philosophical approaches.

Reminds me of these restorers; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIoi-DSm0e4

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