Jennifer Schansberg wrote on Aug. 30, that:
 
"This only goes to show how differently museum people and
          archaeologists feel about objects!"
 
I don't think that is a fair characterization. This particular archaeologist, on
 the advice of a museum conservator, stopped using whiteout some ten years ago b
ecause of its apparent instability. I think that most archaeologists make an eff
ort to keep up with current views on conservation of materials, but few conserva
tors seem interested in publishing in the archaeological journals. One exception
 to this was Curt Moyer's column on Archaeological Conservation published in the
 quarterly Society for Historical Archaeology Newsletter. Did any other conserva
tor from a museum ever alert the archaeological community that whiteout was not
a good medium to use? If this was such a problem then there should have been a n
otice published in each of the main journals. Was there? If so, I missed reading
 it. Is there any empirical evidence of whiteout's failure, or is this simply an
 educated opinion? If whiteout really is unstable, then the conservators have a
real problem on their hands. !
I used whiteout on artifacts from 1971-1984 and have put tens of thousands of ar
tifacts into "permanent" curation. Whiteout was the standard used in archaeology
 for several decades. Seems to me that a dialogue between conservators and archa
eologists needs to be improved. What else are we doing wrong? If you care to cha
nge things then let us have a dialogue. There are several archaeologists on this
 list who are networked well with the archaeology listservers, so we can cross-p
ost the more interesting comments.
 
William H. Adams
P.O. Box 1177
Philomath, OR 97370-1177  USA
503-929-3102       -3264 fax
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