Preservation and Rehousing Project
The Peabody Museum is steward to a rare and important collection of Mesoamerican plaster casts that were created in the late nineteenth century. The casts are very important because they preserve information from original stone carvings that has now become increasingly lost to erosion, destruction, or looters (Fash 2004a, 2004b; Jackson 2004).
In July 2007, the Museum initiated a major preservation project to document, condition-assess, clean, and stabilize more than seven hundred and fifty of the plaster casts that comprise sculptural art and hieroglyphic writing facsimiles from monuments and buildings at more than twenty-five archaeological sites in Mesoamerica.
In the 1980s, many casts were moved to a storage facility located in a large industrial building. Unfortunately, the casts were cut into sections, stacked, and stored in very poor environmental conditions, and then left for many years.
Fig. 1. Old storage conditions
Stabilization and Rehousing
The cast preservation/rehousing project was a museum- and University-wide collaboration, involving curators, collection managers and assistants, conservators, and art handlers, with support from financial, database, and information technology. The following describes conservation’s role in this project.
During the first phase of the project, the Conservation team worked collaboratively with other teams and was responsible for advising on handling/moving, documenting, condition-assessing, cleaning, and stabilizing, and then rehousing plaster casts.
Left in long-term storage in a very dusty, uncontrolled environment, many of the casts were extremely dirty, soiled, and damaged. From July 2007 to May 2008, the Conservation team cleaned, stabilized, documented, and rehoused more than seven hundred and fifty casts.
Fig. 2. Plaster cast # 33-16-20/285.5 partially cleaned
Treatment for Exhibition
At a later date, the curator narrowed down the selection to 167 casts that required further treatment for exhibition. This final treatment phase includes structural stabilization backing, filling, and inpainting, as well as future collaboration with the Exhibit department to design appropriate display supports.
Fig. 3. Roosevelt Julien, Diana Medellin and Stuart Heebner bringing two sections of stelae 7 (93-27-20/C587.1 and .2) together. Fig. 4. Stelae 7 after reconstruction
Fig. 5. Diana Medellin and Christie Pohl reconstructing a plaster cast.
Fig. 7. Cast project team, 2007
Fig. 8. “All the World is Here: the museum’s 150th anniversary exhibition showing casts currently on display
One rare cast in the Peabody collection is currently on display in “All the World is Here: the museum’s 150th anniversary exhibition. Stela 25 from Piedras Negras was defaced and scattered by looters in the 1970s, so the Peabody’s 19th century cast is the only remaining copy of the intact monument.
References
Barbara W. Fash (2004) Cast Aside: Revisiting the Plaster Cast Collections from Mesoamerica, Visual Resources, 20:1, 3-17, DOI: 10.1080/0197376042000191541