Preserving

 the  Artifacts

Preserving the artifacts was a big step.  The excavators called other museums for help and learned a lot, but only a little on preservation.  The excavators called many museums and universities in the United States.  The museums and universities were not much help.  The excavators actually called people in Germany, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and England.  Then they contacted some conservators and finally received some information on removing rust and preserving techniques for other artifacts. 

.  If you were to go to the museum, you would be able to watch an employee or one of the founders preserve the artifacts.  They don’t restore anything; they just preserve it.  When the museum preserves the artifacts, everything they do can be undone.  All the preserved artifacts can be made to look exactly how they did when they were originally found, so nothing is restored, just preserved. When cleaning artifacts, they use different techniques for different types of artifacts.  To get rust off a metal item, they use dental tools to scrape rust off.  The rust usually pops off easily.  To keep metal from rusting again, they put tannic acid on the surface of the metal.  To clean dishes and glass, they simply wash them.  If the dish or glass item is broken, it must be glued with lacquer (lacquer is a little bit like varnish).  To preserve wood and leather, the item must be soaked in polyethylene glycol.  Polyethylene glycol is a waxy substance that is absorbed into wood and leather and makes wood stronger, and makes leather flexible again. Also, the wooden artifacts had to be soaked in a chemical used to strengthen wood that has been in water for such a long time.  The preserving chemical is called PEG-400.  If a wood item is left to dry without the aid of any preservation treatment, it will be damaged in just a few days.  The excavators used PEG-400 to preserve some parts of the Arabia for future display.  They knew they could not provide enough money to preserve all of the Arabia, so they only chose two pieces to preserve. They chose the stern, which is the rear part of the ship, and the part that held the larboard engine and paddlewheel.  At the museum, they used to shower the parts with PEG-400.  The wooden artifacts had to be placed in a huge, limestone cave, where there is darkness, humidity and cool temperatures A freeze dryer is also used to get water out of leather.  Most clothing did not survive because it was made of cotton, and cotton disintegrates in water over time.  The few articles of clothing that survived were made of protein products, such as wool, beaver hair and silk.  Even that clothing had fallen apart because its seams were sewn with cotton thread.  Since the museum does not want to restore artifacts, but wants to preserve them, they try to sew the clothing up the exact way it was, and if they can, they try to put the thread through the exact same hole it was in before!  You might think that that is restoring, but restoring is making it look like new.  Preserving is making it strong enough to have it not fall apart.  To clean some copper pieces, they use an eraser that is attached to a machine that spins it around quickly.  The eraser polishes copper to a shine.  You can polish all your copper pieces (such as pennies) this way.  Take the eraser on the end of a pencil, and rub it in small circles on the penny.  You get best results if you put a lot of weight on the eraser.  If it turns out right, you should have lots of shiny pennies!  Preserving bottled goods was very difficult.  They had to find a way to keep bacteria from growing inside the bottles.  They decided to apply canning wax to the corks, and put them in cold storage at 36º Fahrenheit.  Preserving the artifacts was one of the difficult, but necessary jobs the museum had to do.