The afternoon OSG\/ADG session began with a fascinating talk by Donna Strahan, Conservator in the Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that very successfully demonstrated the importance of cooperation and flexibility in the preservation of cultural property. Donna began by introducing the site of Troy, where she has spent many seasons as a field conservator.\u00a0 Troy is excavated by a number of international institutions, but a single conservation lab treats the finds unearthed from all of the excavations. The large site provides ample opportunities for education, functioning as both an archaeological field school and a place for conservation training for an international group of students.\u00a0 Each season there are between one and six conservators and up to four languages spoken in the lab.\u00a0 Although language barriers can pose some difficulty, the varied training and experience of the conservators facilitates the exchange of ideas and re-evaluation of conservation practice.<\/p>\n
In addition to treating finds from the site\u2014an impressive 500-700 per year\u2014the Troy lab is also called upon to do emergency treatment at neighboring sites in the Granicus River Valley.\u00a0 Donna emphasized that emergency conservation is about triage and compromise.\u00a0 The needs of the objects must be prioritized, but the decision of what gets treated outside of Troy is often tied to local politics. The help of the Troy team is often sought in response to or in anticipation of looting, an example of which is the Dedetepe Tumulus<\/strong>, dating to the 5th<\/sup> c. BCE.\u00a0\u00a0 In the course of their work, the Troy conservators discovered, among other things, the fingerprints of ancient robbers on the marble sarcophagus, painted marble beds, and a shattered alabaster vessel with resides of Tyrian purple; the latter may provide direct evidence of a funeral ceremony that involved dipping ribbons into purple dye and tying them around a vessel.\u00a0 Donna then went on to describe several other Granicus River Valley projects:<\/p>\n These case studies were wonderful illustrations of both the difficulties and benefits of emergency conservation.\u00a0 Emergency excavations, Donna said, are rarely scientifically excavated, there is rarely time to plan, and you\u2019re often working with unfamiliar people and objects.\u00a0 However, without this important work, the wealth of information contained in these sites and artifacts might be lost entirely.\u00a0 The finds from Granicus River Valley projects are regularly published in the Studia Troica<\/em>, giving these objects (which generally languish in storage or worse) a place in the archaeological record.\u00a0 At the end of her talk, Donna showed a recent picture of Dedeteppe Tumulus, completely destroyed by looters\u2014a powerful reminder of just how essential emergency conservation can be.<\/p>\n In the question period, Tony Sigel, Conservator of Objects and Sculpture at the Harvard Art Museums, said that his rule of thumb is to generally make any modern damage to an object as invisible as possible.\u00a0 He asked Donna if she considered inpainting the damage done by the looters with the backhoe.\u00a0 Donna replied that she would not<\/em> choose to inpaint for two reasons: she did not want observers to think that the conservators were \u201crepainting\u201d the sarcophagus, and she thought it was important to demonstrate just how much damage looting does.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The afternoon OSG\/ADG session began with a fascinating talk by Donna Strahan, Conservator in the Sherman Fairchild Center for Objects Conservation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that very successfully demonstrated the importance of cooperation and flexibility in the preservation of cultural property. Donna began by introducing the site of Troy, where she has spent … Continue reading “AIC’s 39th Annual Meeting- Joint Objects and Archaeological Discussion Group Session, June 2, \u201cBeyond the Field Lab: Emergency Conservation in the Granicus River Valley of Northwestern Turkey,\u201d by Donna Strahan”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,32,16],"tags":[70,344,368,392,477,970,1029],"class_list":["post-1244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-annual-meeting","category-objects","category-specialty-sessions","tag-aics-39th-annual-meeting","tag-dedetepe-tumulus","tag-donna-strahan","tag-emergency-conservation","tag-granicus-river-valley","tag-studia-troica","tag-troy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/resources.culturalheritage.org\/conservators-converse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n