Hot take: Should museums rebury artifacts after study?

I just hit 50 posts on a forum arguing about this and it surprised me how split people are. One side says digging up and displaying ancient stuff destroys its spiritual context for descendant communities. The other side says we learn way more from keeping it in a lab. Where do you land on this?

2 comments

2 Comments

tarak176d ago

Has anyone thought about the actual preservation problems with reburying? Like you dig up a woven basket or a wooden tool and it's been in stable ground for centuries, but now it's exposed to air and light. By the time your study is done, that thing is already rotting away fast in a lab, let alone if you put it back in the dirt where bacteria and moisture will just finish it off. Is reburying really giving it a second life or just letting it crumble back to nothing?

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janaf916d ago

Wait, did you actually try that and see how bad it got? I had the same worry with some old pottery I dug up once, and yeah, it started flaking apart in a few weeks after exposure, so I figure reburying would just speed that up.