History of preventive conservation

Simon Lambert <simonlambert9 [at] hotmail__com> writes

>I am working on a paper about the history of preventive conservation as
>part of a degree in art conservation. I am interested in getting
>members' impressions and opinions about the early years of preventive
>conservation, what they think triggered this change in attitude towards
>conservation and when it occurred. ...

I wrote an article that appeared in Museum Management and
Curatorship in 1993 (v. 12, pp. 387-400) that was an outline of some
of the source material because it focused on storage and the
Solander box.  Some of the earlier examples I discuss include the
ancient temple at Uruk in Mesopotamia where custodians in charge of
the archives of the Temple of Eanna constructed their storage area
with grooved floors surrounded by low walls so as to allow water to
flow into the archives and evaporate there.  This system helped
preserve the unfired clay tablets from crumbling in the hot dry
climate.

Niccolo Caldararo, Ph.D.
Dept. of Anthropology
San Francisco State University


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 21:43
               Distributed: Wednesday, February 13, 2008
                       Message Id: cdl-21-43-007
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