Cet obscur objet d’un désir contrarié

Abstract

This paper revisits the tensions between conservation-restoration and archaeology through the common subject of their practice: the object. A brief overview of the history of the relations between these two disciplines, originally associated, suggests that it is the change in the heuristic status of the object that led to a division of the tasks. Whilst archaeology tends to submit the materiality of the object to issues of contexts and environments, giving it the role of a prompts for interpretations, conservation tends to approach the object as a bundle of material indexes. This division between the construction of historical discourses and material production of knowledge ends up giving the work of conservation a subaltern position. Instead, the paper suggests that conservators, in addition to restoring the object materially, also restore the centrality of its materiality in the production of archaeological knowledge.

Keywords

• conservation-restoration
• object
• materiality
• objects biography
• historiography
• semiotics