Field Conservation of Archaeological Textile Artefacts as a Preparatory Stage For Laboratory Restoration

Abstract

Archaeological textile finds are rare due to their poor preservation state. Unearthed and recorded textile artefacts or their fragments often simply do not reach the restoration stage as they are destroyed during burial cleaning, removal from the soil, or during transportation. The use of field conservation methods allows for preservation and relatively painless extraction of fragile textile fragments, with delivery to a stationary resto­ration laboratory without further damage. All field conservation methods are temporary measures. The paper describes a method of field conservation of textile from a certain archaeological site using a low molecular weight solution of polyethylene glycol (PEG-200) and antiseptic Lysoformin-3000 in situ from the moment of discovery to the allocation of finds to a permanent storage facility.

Keywords

• archaeological textile
• gornopravdinsky burial site
• khanty-mansi autonomous okrug-yugra
• field conservation
• textile restoration
• peg
• lysoformin