Preservation: A Case of Triage

Great news, historians! The alps are melting!

In northern Italy, melting glaciers have exposed the mummified bodies of World War I soldiers who died in battle at 12,000 feet of elevation. The story is fascinating: "shelling lowered the summit of one mountain, San Matteo, by 20ft." In recent decades, "[m]ore than 80 soldiers who fell in the White War have come to light." A curator at the historic monument at 6,500ft hopes that "intrepid hikers will be able to visit...and, as he puts it, 'smell the war'."

Researchers are still struggling to identify the names of the soldiers they have recovered, and search parties have hunted for the body of Italian captain Arnoldo Berni for almost a century without success. Glacier archaeologists, however, are accustomed to these sorts of obstacles. [Excerpt]

Glacier archaeology, as the field is called, has been referred to as the silver lining in the cloud of global warming...But it is a race against time. As soon as organic material melts out of the preserving ice and is exposed to the elements again, it starts to decay...The sheer amount of material now in this precarious condition -- Swiss glaciers, for example, have lost a third of their volume since 1860 -- means that archaeologists simply cannot reach it all in time, not least because it is often inaccessible outside the narrow window of summer at these altitudes. It's a case of triage, says [Craig Lee at the University of Colorado, Boulder.]

Even when the past reveals itself to us most directly, we cannot recover - let alone study or evaluate - the full revelation. This will always be true about the past. Meanwhile, the fact that these recovery efforts require racing against melting glaciers suggests that triage also operates on a geologic scale. It reminds me of William Cronon's thoughts about preserving wilderness.

If visitors come [to the Apostle Islands] and believe that they are experiencing pristine nature, they will completely misunderstand not just the complex human history that has created the Apostle Islands of today; they will also fail to understand how much the natural ecosystems they encounter here have been shaped by that human history. In a very deep sense, what they will experience is not the natural and human reality of these islands, but a cultural myth that obscures much of what they most need to understand about a wilderness that has long been a place of human dwelling.

What set of priorities allows us to understand preservationist archaeology as a silver lining to climate change? Partly it is the cultural myth of a pristine past, free from present day challenges. These glaciers remind us that the past will always be a place of human dwelling.