Another side of conservation

[Dennis Piechota]

Has something like this ever happened to you in the course of your work:

It is stone silent in the storage room. There is only the sound of your breathing and your pencil on paper. Working alone after hours, you are surrounded by thousands of museum objects. You take a break from the stream of your survey work to stretch, looking up and around you. You might have heard a sound but in the stillness you become suddenly aware of your presence in a space concentrated with objects that are at once both foreign and familiar, each with its own humbling, uplifting, disturbing and spiritual story. You feel in awe; an awareness that through your work you are in a way personally connecting to greatness, loss and constancy and to the historic acquisition processes that brought those objects to this place. It is at once both deeply saddening and wondrous. The moment passes; you return to work.

I experienced this for the first time while surveying the ethnographic collections of the former attic storage room of the Peabody Museum at Harvard back in the 1970s. Whenever it recurs I am reminded that conservation is not just a technical field, a form of applied material science. There is a side to our work that can be deeply moving.

     Apologies to Ansel Adams

Best,

Dennis

Dennis Piechota

Archaeological Conservator

Fiske Center for Archaeological Research
UMass Boston
Office: 617-287-6829

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