A. Site Conservation
Introduction

In principle, everything that is laid bare in the excavations is susceptible to conservation – in the first place the features of the built environment, such as walls, floors or installations, but also aspects resulting from archaeological intervention, such as sections.

Being outdoors, these elements are the object of conflicting degrees of attention. On the one hand, they require extreme and immediate care, precisely because, being exposed to the weather, they are more readily degraded. On the other, the scope of the task is so vast, and the impression of durability so deceptive, that one is easily tempted not to do anything until it is too late.

Which is why conservation of the outdoor often resorts to restoration, and, perhaps even more frequently, to outright reconstruction of what we may call doubly ruined ruins – original ruins as they were when first excavated, ruined once more by the subsequent neglect.

At Mozan, site conservation has been a central concern since the beginning, and the site has served as a wide open experimental ground not only for a variety of practical innovations, but also for an ongoing reflection on matters of theory.

The following chapters are completed and in current use:

• Environmental conditions. – The section on temperature and humidity is of special relevance, since it gives a complete daily record from 2001 until today.
• Mudbrick conservation. – This section contains a complete photographic and descriptive record of every wall in the Palace of Tupkish (= AP), beginning in 2001 and continuing uninterruptedly until today – a real unique in the field…
• Project publications. – Here one will find a full list of all our publications regarding conservation, with abstracts and links to the full texts of each reference (for further bibliography, see the e-Library).