Treasures of Clay - page 6

The museum is now 110 years old, and when earlier workers restored pots, their practices were not necessarily up to current professional standards. Sometimes the provenance is not documented, and sometimes their cure for a cracked pot was worse than the original break. The remedy is not always immediately apparent. Sometimes the conservators must play detective, using the equipment to learn, say, the chemical composition of an old adhesive, or to detect the presence of glue.

On this particular day, a prehistoric Mogollon pot is getting its moment on the sand work table. Odegaard picks it up. It’s a fine polychrome specimen, with designs in black and white and red, but someone filled in its cracks with a plastic that would never be used today.

“This is unsightly,” Odegaard says. “Should we remove it?”

Another item, a cracked brown “corrugated” pot, so-called for ridges resembling corrugated cardboard, was once shattered into dozens of pieces. Some unknown worker in the past carefully reunited the shards into a pot, piecing it together like a jigsaw puzzle.

“It was well put together,” Odegaard decrees, “but poorly glued.”

Still another, full of holes, is held together by dozens of small sticks. An old adhesive is yellowing, dried, and no longer functioning. Odegaard says the plan is to remove the old glue. The pot will be placed in an airtight glass vessel with solvent inside and a lid on top. Chemical vapors will rise up and dissolve the adhesive, while the lid will prevent the noxious vapors from escaping into the lab.

But the piece’s future is in doubt. While it may have started its life centuries ago as a functional pot, it may no longer “be a pot,” Odegaard says, by the museum’s standards. Broken and deteriorated, it may end up in a labeled bag, a collection of pieces stored and available for study, and become a “teaching tool.”