For my sixth birthday, my mom took me to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for the evening. It was an intoxicating combination – staying out past my bedtime, driving into the city, and strolling in breathless wonder through what seemed to be miles of rooms filled with artifacts far removed from my own lived experience. My imagination was most captured by the “Hall of Ancient Egypt,” which had an alcove lined with sarcophagi – including several shockingly small specimens that once held children. Seeing these pieces of history laid before me and knowing that they once contained the bodies of people not unlike myself – separated only by 5,000 years or so – was a visceral and overwhelming thought that I still carry with me. I understood then the importance of preserving artifacts that could continue to illuminate history to generations of viewers.
This past summer, a full fourteen years later, I stood in the midst of a dusty, weed-infested, first century Corinthian marketplace. As a member of Grove City College’s summer program in partnership with the Archaeological Conservation Institute, I had donned a wide-brimmed hat and work gloves. Armed with a toothbrush and broom, I was busy sweeping and dusting and weed-pulling and scrubbing the ancient shop walls, terra cotta tiled floors, and mosaic walkway for five hours each morning, until the sun drove us inside. It was such purpose-driven work – the site had been excavated almost a century ago, but without a proper conservation plan in place, it had fallen into chaos and been rapidly deteriorating as tourists strolled by each day to visit the much more glamorous Temple of Apollo on a hill above us. We knew that the manual labor we were executing each morning was going to protect and maintain a site that had been a safely buried treasure for almost two thousand years but now lay at risk of being unrecognizably destroyed by the open exposure to the elements.
Throughout that month, I thought much about the necessity of consistent conservation work in historic sites – a complex process, since a marketplace is much more awkward to move into a museum than is a sarcophagus (and besides, most archaeologists are in agreement that moving a site from its original spot inherently compromises the message and meaning it would have held for its original audience). There are two different schools of thought that have arisen around how to conserve a site – either to completely cover it with protective material, which will stop most erosion but hide it entirely from the public’s view, or to maintain the site with regularity but continue to leave it exposed to the public. This latter approach will aid in education but will eventually result in the deterioration of the site, perhaps even harming it to the point that future generations will not be able to see anything at all. Maybe the ideal situation can be seen at the Acropolis Museum in Athens, where a building has been constructed over the archaeological site, protecting it from elements while also allowing tourists to view the site from constructed walkways. But this also could eventually compromise the integrity of the site if the building under which it rests ever needs major work – and, besides, this would be impossibly expensive for many smaller sites. Despite the pros and cons, everyone at work in the field of archaeological conservation – including myself, in a small way over this summer – understands the tension between maintaining a site after its transportable artifacts have been removed and the site is laid bare to the elements, while also keeping it accessible so that future generations can continue to learn from those tangible evidences of history.
But I had one more influential experience with a place of historical preservation this summer, and it threw a shadow over what had seemed, up to that point, to be an easy assumption in my mind. While touring Vienna with my mother after ACI wrapped up, I spent an afternoon strolling through the halls of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, which also houses Imperial treasures of the Hapsburgs. It was a fabulous and, frankly, overwhelming display of wealth. Maybe I was exhausted after six weeks of travel – or maybe the museum really did house too much. Whatever the case, as the hours stretched on and I stumbled into room after identical room full of display cases of incredible and bizarre centerpieces, statues, clocks, candlesticks, dishes, vases, picture frames, walking sticks, and every other type of household good that could be covered in gold, I began to wonder about the practical logistics of preserving history. What gives something inherent historical value, and how do we express that to future generations? The grandiose wealth displayed at Kunsthistorisches filled rooms, but all told the same story – that of a powerful imperial family bent on impressing themselves and the world around them with lavish displays of knick-knacks. The museum didn’t help in telling the story – most of the labels for the objects gave little more than an approximate date and a curator’s best shot at a name – “Gold Clock” or “Ship Centerpiece.” Rather than inspiring, these displays sapped me of energy, seeming to hold little importance outside their status as oddities.
Perhaps that is less the fault of the objects and more of the curators – with so little effort put into telling a cohesive narrative with the objects, I – a tourist with little background knowledge of the artifacts – felt as if I stood in a library that wasn’t categorized using my alphabet. Or perhaps my expectations for what I should receive from a trip to a museum are askew. Whatever the case, I wonder how long our world can continue to accumulate artifacts in museums and private collections and archives. My summer working in Greece showed me that conservation of artifacts isn’t a joke – it can mean both heavy manual labor and the most precise puzzle-piecing, while always being under fire from the elements and the natural processes of decay. It would be impossible to eternally maintain everything that has any claim to “historical significance,” but at the same time, who can definitively determine that this amphora holds historic value, while this one does not?
I won’t claim that one summer of pondering these questions has brought me anywhere closer to answering them. I do hope, however, that I will continue to enjoy museums and historical sites of all shapes and sizes for the rest of my life – always appreciating the hours of work and research hidden behind each display case, while also considering the narrative (or lack thereof) that each collection shares with their artifacts, and the efforts which must be made to continue to express those narratives cognizantly to future generations.
