[HN Gopher] Saving the Ancient Glass Artifacts Shattered in the ...
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       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.
        
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       (page generated 2022-09-17 23:00 UTC)