Fire at Brazil's National Museum

[ZiprHead]

https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/02/americas/brazil-national-museum-fire-intl/index.html

Priceless artifacts spanning 11,000 years went up in flames as an inferno swallowed Brazil's National Museum.

More than 20 million pieces of history, including Egyptian mummies and historic artwork, may have been destroyed.

This is an international tragedy.

 

[Sarpedon]

Yeah, it is utterly appalling. How can they amass a collection so valuable, then half-ass the building?

ETA: they can't tell whether it was bad wiring or one of those fucking homemade hot air balloons landing on the roof. This is why those things, and all fireworks, really, ought to be fucking banned. Because they fucking start fires!

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Arson to cover up major theft, perhaps?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Arson to cover up major theft, perhaps?

Sure. And the theft was part of a diabolically complicated plot to destroy a major city.

 

[rousseau]

I think more a loss for Brazil than it is for the field of history, assuming their artifacts were well documented and quantified.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah, it is utterly appalling. How can they amass a collection so valuable, then half-ass the building?

ETA: they can't tell whether it was bad wiring or one of those fucking homemade hot air balloons landing on the roof. This is why those things, and all fireworks, really, ought to be fucking banned. Because they fucking start fires!

It's a lesson that we never seem to learn. People in charge of buildings are careless right up until it bites them.

 

[Sarpedon]

Not so-rousseau, new discoveries are made in the collections of museums all the time.

An old sketch or manuscript mixed in with more mundane documents. A mis-classified animal specimin. An old fossil that yields new data from some new testing apparatus. The potential losses are endless!

 

[rousseau]

Not so-rousseau, new discoveries are made in the collections of museums all the time.

An old sketch or manuscript mixed in with more mundane documents. A mis-classified animal specimin. An old fossil that yields new data from some new testing apparatus. The potential losses are endless!

That's fair. Even then I think the practical impact of any of this new information might tend to be overstated.

I'm reminded of a comment made by Ted Gioia a while ago about the CBC in Canada digitizing their CD library and destroying the sleeves without documenting them. Sounds good on paper to stick up for that kind of thing, but realistically documenting these sleeves would just result in even more 'information' out there that nobody cares about, and is only studied by academics writing in obscure journals that very few would ever read. People will get up in arms about preservation, but time moves on, things are lost to the past, and documenting every last thing might be less important than it seems.

Granted, I'm as big of a history buff as it gets, and obviously we'd be better off if the museum hadn't burned down, but I don't think our collective knowledge about the past is going to be significantly damaged by this.