Conservation of a 2nd century Roman barge from Lyon (France)

Abstract

The conservation of a 2nd-century AD shipwreck represents a challenge in many ways: the amount of material, different ones such as waterlogged wood, iron, lead, textiles, pitch, among others. A global project has to be planned, meaning that scale adaptations had to be thought of taking into account the exceptional size and diversity matters. On top of it, a common thread with pyrite has to be taken into account to avoid acidification by little footsteps at each conservation care stage. To do this, a complete dismantling has occurred, allowing the removal of 26 meters of waterproofing material which happened to be pitched textiles. To explore the data embedded inside, a new unfolding protocol had to be elaborated; that respected their fragility. New issues arose from this work, allowing to link the textiles to the barge, and also opened new exploration fields of an exceptional set of roman textiles.