[HN Gopher] Saving the Ancient Glass Artifacts Shattered in the ... ___________________________________________________________________ Saving the Ancient Glass Artifacts Shattered in the Beirut Explosion Author : prismatic Score : 18 points Date : 2022-09-17 18:17 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com) | hilbert42 wrote: | 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. | gus_massa wrote: | > _It took a week for the team, under Cuyaubere's guidance, to | collect all the glass fragments on the museum's floor. With the | training that they received from Cuyaubere, 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? | dylan604 wrote: | 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? | gus_massa wrote: | 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 ) | tpmx wrote: | 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-09-17 23:00 UTC)