The Devastating Fire at Brazil’s National Museum Illuminates a Global Problem
Protecting artifacts from entropy is no easy task.
By Eleanor Cummins
A 12,000-year-old skull, one of the oldest ever found in the Western Hemisphere. Macaw feathers fashioned by the Inca into wedding attire. And a Chilean mummy found high and dry in the Atacama desert thousands of years after his death. These are just a few of the 20 million priceless artifacts damaged or destroyed in a fire at Brazil’s National Museum Sept. 2.
The true extent of the devastation has yet to be determined, though 90 percent of the artifacts are thought lost forever. Early news reports of the wreckage and images of the raging fire shocked an international community of curators and museum personnel, who took to public platforms like Twitter. But those on the ground knew the chaos had been a long time coming — and the truth is that many of our cultural treasures teeter on the verge of the same kind of disaster.
“This was a tragedy foretold,” Renato Rodriguez Cabral, who worked in the museum’s geology and paleontology department, told Reuters. The four years preceding the fire saw the funding for the museum decline by more than a third, according to the wire service. The 200-year-old building had no sprinkler system. And even…
