WOAM-TASTIC

Paolo Dionisi Vici squeezes into Susanne Grieve’s car to go to lunch at the WOAM conference

Imagine a field where the artifacts to be treated are ridiculously delicate and complex, as well as deteriorated. Imagine you have to make weighty decisions in a hurry, because the artifacts are going to get irreversibly much worse very fast if you don’t. Imagine you don’t have much time to make these decisions. Imagine the artifacts are often wonderful and amazing, with high exhibition and research potential. Ready, set GO! And don’t mess up! This is what we’re talking about with waterlogged material that was once plant or animal in origin. Since 1981, there’s been an ICOM-CC working group for Wet Organic Archaeological Materials. It meets once every three years and puts out proceedings. There are a few really special things about this group, and one of them is their reputation. Highly professional, very international, unusually welcoming and open-minded. And in a way, they have to be. Many of these treatments have gone wrong in the past. There is a lot of material for which there is no fully satisfactory treatment. Perhaps to a greater degree than many other areas of conservation, this group needs to learn from mistakes and dead ends. So it must welcome them. The call for abstracts well in advance means that you write up an abstract for what you hope will be your happy outcome, and then you must come and tell folks why if it didn’t turn out that way. And they will cheerfully say, “Thank you! Nice try! Most interesting! What can we learn from this if we put our heads together?” Maybe someone might pull you aside over a beer and gently suggest something you had not thought of, but they did not want to seem harsh in front of the group. Honestly, there are not that many people worldwide working on this kind of material, so we cannot afford to be isolationist. An innovative feather keratin treatment was been the buzz for a while, and someone came from Japan to describe it. Someone else from Denmark reported results from separate analysis in the next presentation, and the conclusion was that the feather keratin treatment is probably not the next big thing. But everyone wanted to hear it and glean what kinds of clues and insight there might be in the study of the material. Later, people were saying, “Isn’t there something going on in Italy right now with starch? What are they up to? What about the work in Mainz?” Those folks may or may not have success with their experiments, but they can rest assured they would be most welcome at WOAM. Some nice things about the structure: the conference is all one big session, not concurrent sessions. The poster folks have to get up and give a little verbal 5 minute summary. There is lots of group discussion. And maybe the best thing they do, is they write up all that verbal discussion in the proceedings!! As one delegate (attendees are called delegates) said to me, “When I read a WOAM article, first I read the abstract, then I read the comments at the end, and finally I read the article.” I think those comments and discussions published at the end really give the flavor of WOAM. Very intellectually curious and not interested in passing a judgment about good or bad, but rather a search for the useful.

Today is Sunday May 30th. Last night I was in tears because I missed my connection home and now I am stuck with 6 ½ extra hours of travel. But it is a blessing in disguise. This is the first time I have really had some clearheaded, well-rested, caffeinated time to reflect and process on the conference. During the conference, I was talking to people or attending talks from breakfast at 7am, clear through till my head hit the pillow, exhausted, at 10pm. In talking to people I was processing the information, but also taking in new information the whole time. Being there was exhilarating, but while I was in the middle of it there was little time for processing what I was learning and synthesizing new ideas. For a review of all the papers and posters at the 2010 WOAM conference, please see my weblog at Texthttp://ellencarrlee.wordpress.com.