Technology to the rescue
A pernicious white fungus has spread “like snow” in the caves of Lascaux in France, where the fabulous rock art has been described as the Sistine Chapel of prehistory. The fungus is believed to have been introduced after contractors began to install a new air-conditioning system that was meant to preserve the precious 17,000-year-old cave paintings from heat and humidity.
– Irish Independent
It’s possible that the above link may require (free) registration to the Indo, so I’ll give you the jist of the story…
An artist, or group of artists, produced a series of paintings on the walls of a cave system in Lascaux, France. Seventeen thousand years later, authorities decided that the paintings needed to be protected from heat and humidity and installed an air conditioning system.
The air-conditioning system altered the environment of the caves – which had remained fairly stable for 17 millennia – and within weeks the ground was infested with a white fungus. The authorities who installed the air conditioning claimed that the fungus wouldn’t spread to the paintings. They claimed that it would remain on the ground.
It didn’t.
Now the fungus has begun to encroach upon the paintings and the authorities who installed the new technology are employing people to very carefully remove strands of the fungus from the paintings by hand in order to protect them from their first serious threat in 17,000 years.
A news story and a parable.
The air-conditioning system altered the environment of the caves – which had remained fairly stable for 17 millennia
That’s not quite true, though. For 16.95 millenia the caves were completely buried then all of a sudden they weren’t anymore, and several million people were walking through them.
[Declaration: I was there three weeks ago.]
May 10th, 2006 | 2:57pm
by Jarndyce
Point taken. Though if the technology is being introduced – in essence – to protect the paintings against tourists, it hardly makes the situation much better (there’s obviously a far easier way to protect them against tourists).
May 10th, 2006 | 3:01pm
by Jim
Yeah, you’re right, which is why when you go there now you have to walk through caves that are an exact replica of the real caves but were actually custom-built below them. The sudden exposure to the air, then the sweat and bacteria from millions of Frenchies (they were an attraction in the “wonder of the age” mould), almost caused the real paintings to disappear, so they closed the real caves. I suspect that whatever solutions they come up with will be a bit Canute like. I can’t imagine that something so fragile as paintings on a wall could survive the instant switch from “hermetically-sealed” to “more popular than the Eiffel tower” too well.
May 10th, 2006 | 3:48pm
by Jarndyce
Federico Fellini’s film Roma contains a very similar scene, in which a group tunnelling under Rome to construct the underground railway system stumbles across a presumably priceless collection of ancient Roman paintings, all of which fade away to nonexistence on their first exposure to air in a couple of millennia.
I don’t know whether Fellini based this on a specific real-life incident, but apparently this sort of thing is endemic in a place with that much history.
May 10th, 2006 | 6:58pm
by Michael