Just realized there's a big split on whether we should restore pottery or leave the cracks

I was at a talk last month where a curator showed a 300 year old pot they'd glued back together with modern epoxy worth about 200 bucks. Half the room thought it was great for display, the other half said it ruins the artifact's authenticity. So where do you draw the line between saving a piece and messing with its history? Has anyone else run into this at their local dig or museum?

2 comments

2 Comments

henry_palmer241mo ago

...and honestly the curator probably spent more time arguing about it than the repair was worth. My rule of thumb is if the cracks tell a story or show how the piece was used, I'd leave them visible. But if it's just shattered into a hundred pieces and you can't even tell what it looked like, epoxy away lol. I've worked on a few digs where we had to decide this exact thing, and we mostly went with reversible repairs that don't hide the damage but make the pot stable enough to handle. If a museum wants to display it, they gotta weigh whether showing the broken bits is more educational than showing a complete pot.

gavins431mo ago

@henry_palmer24 that fully fixing it with modern stuff just makes it a fake for display.