Archaeology is a scientific discipline that requires other competencies and forms of expertise to help reconstruct how people lived in the past. Conservation is one of these many competencies and aims to understand artefacts such as ceramic objects.
A discipline
Archaeological materials unearthed during excavations, particularly terracotta, are often found in pieces and do not provide a general view of what an object would originally have looked like. Conservation aims to render the altered object intelligible in order to put it on public display. If the ceramic is extremely fragile, impressive or has important parts missing, however, simply reassembling it for the purpose of studying it – a task usually undertaken by the archaeologist or ceramologist – is more complex and requires the expert knowledge of a conservator.
Reversibility and intelligibility are the keys to every conservation action.
A well-honed protocol
Ceramic artefacts are conserved according to a well-established protocol.
The conservator starts by removing everything that does not belong to the object; they might clean off sedimentary residues with water or dissolve previous gluing in a chemical bath depending on the glue used, or remove it manually with a scalpel. Next, they glue the fragments, or sherds, of ceramic together. Before finally gluing it together, the conservator may occasionally need to piece part of the object together "with blanks" using adhesive crepe tape to reconnect the sherds and organise the reassembly. The missing sections can be filled using pigmented modelling plaster.
Applying the technique in Réunion
A large stoneware ceramic from the Route des premiers Français site in Saint-Paul was conserved by Arc’Antique, based in Nantes. The work was done on the premises of the CCE (Centre de Conservation et d’Étude) in Saint-Denis, foreshadowing its future role as a leading conservation actor for the Indian Ocean area. The CCE is part of an existing network of similar French centres that bring together collections discovered in the region, store them and make them available to researchers and conservators, and share archaeological knowledge.
