3 ms·

"A study commissioned by the Austrian government claimed that a safe return would be impossible without a specially designed case to protect it from the vibrati

by tekkk 9y ago

"A study commissioned by the Austrian government claimed that a safe return would be impossible without a specially designed case to protect it from the vibrations caused by flight. According to the study, it would require a plane 984 feet long—the length of 2.7 football fields—and 164 feet high to buffer the vibrations caused by take-off and landing. Since no such plane exists the repatriation seems unlikely in the short term." What a lame excuse. Have they ever heard of ships? You know, those things that got the thing there in the first place. Granted maybe the study linked in the article also considered the vibrations from a sea journey but in that case it was poor wording on the writer's part. Not to nitpick too much =). Interesting read nonetheless.

LeifCarrotson 9y ago
Here's an excerpt from the linked article[1] on the study (I can't find the study itself, but it seems to be rather politically motivated and useless as an engineering study). I found the article difficult to read, but in short, they found that vibrations of the display case were very slowly causing damage. So they built it a vibration-damping vitrine, or glass display case, specifically to limit these vibrations. The new case has a specification for how much vibration it allows, while the headdress sits for years without moving in the museum. The study requires it to undergo no more than that acceleration during transport. Yes, to limit accelerations to 1.001g for an entire flight, you'd need a stupidly large case that would allow it to slowly move to the back and down as the plane took off. Just put it on some shock absorbers in a container and send it across the ocean, it's not going to be accumulating damage in shipping for decades as it is in the museum. > The vibration-proof design of the case and mount resulted from the discovery that the headdress was losing many of the individual barbs that make up its feathers. They were found, to the horror of the conservators, lying on the sheet on which the headdress was previously supported. As well as deﬁning the speciﬁcations of its new vitrine, the conservation scientists who analysed the headdress also reported that the levels of vibration encountered in transporting it – by air, for example, to Mexico – could destroy its ﬁne and brittle feathers. > ...report was prepared by the same Austrian engineering company ... based on tests of the vibration in the gallery under different conditions, from a crowd of visitors and a glass cleaning .... All this can be mathematically predicted, and the more the vibration, the larger the container necessary to counter that vibration, according to the laws of physics. 1: https://www.academia.edu/31390854/The_Inbetweenness_of_the_Vitrine_Three_parerga_of_a_feather_headdress https://www.academia.edu/31390854/The_Inbetweenness_of_the_V...
- dpark 9y ago
  > Just put it on some shock absorbers in a container and send it across the ocean, it's not going to be accumulating damage in shipping for decades as it is in the museum. I agree it's a lame excuse. At some point they moved the headdress into the case they engineered so clearly it's possible to move the headdress without it instantly falling apart. Although I always find these requests to return artifacts a little odd anyway. On the one hand, yes, it's part of your heritage and I totally get why you want it returned. On the other hand, if ownership was transferred legally (gifted or sold rather than plundered), I don't see that you have any legitimate claim of ownership. Imagine if France asked for the Statue of Liberty back.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    Moving it a few meters in a controlled environment is vastly different from moving it a few thousand kilometers though turbulent air, choppy sea, and stop-and-go city traffic.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    > ownership was transferred legally (gifted or sold rather than plundered) A legal transfer between equals is one thing. I agree that should be permanently binding. Even if the depreciation of the funds used to purchase the asset and the appreciation of the asset itself make the transaction seem one-sided. But this headdress belonged at one time to the emperor who reigned between 1502 and 1520...in 1521 Cortes conquered the Azteks. Whether it was 'gifted' or 'purchased', it doesn't seem possible to have a particularly legitimate transaction in whatever exchange took place. Perhaps a fair transaction would involve comparing the cost of the actual purchase of the item (which may have involved a one-sided transfer) to a later transaction of a similar item between equals. If a settler purchased a hundred acres of land from a native for a string of beads valued at 9 cents, but settlers sold each other land for $1.25 an acre, and those hundred acres are now worth $300k then perhaps a court could agree that the original sale was invalid and offer to allow the land to be repurchased for somewhere between 300k and the equivalent transaction of 300,0000 x 9 / 1250 = $2,160. Or, in the case of this headdress, they could do a little reenactment. Give the Mexicans some canons, black-powder muskets, and chemical weapons, and the Austrians some flint knives, and set them on opposing sides of a remote rain forest. See what sort of price they can come to agree upon.
kobeya 9y ago
It was originally transported when those feathers were relatively fresh. Now they are 500 years old. Feathers aren't meant to survive that long and remain structurally sound. When Tutankhamun's tomb was found, there were these beautiful beaded sandals that had been preserved exactly as they had been left for 3,200 years. When the archaeologist or assistant (I forget) went to pick them up to transport away, the thing burst apart collapsing into a pile of unordered beads. The strands that had been used to construct it had deteriorated to dust hundreds or thousands of years earlier and the sandals were held together only by the static configuration of the beads. Picking it up changed the relative angle of "down", and boom. Edit: Corrected date.

by tekkk 9y ago

LeifCarrotson 9y ago

Here's an excerpt from the linked article[1] on the study (I can't find the study itself, but it seems to be rather politically motivated and useless as an engineering study). I found the article difficult to read, but in short, they found that vibrations of the display case were very slowly causing damage. So they built it a vibration-damping vitrine, or glass display case, specifically to limit these vibrations. The new case has a specification for how much vibration it allows, while the headdress sits for years without moving in the museum. The study requires it to undergo no more than that acceleration during transport. Yes, to limit accelerations to 1.001g for an entire flight, you'd need a stupidly large case that would allow it to slowly move to the back and down as the plane took off. Just put it on some shock absorbers in a container and send it across the ocean, it's not going to be accumulating damage in shipping for decades as it is in the museum. > The vibration-proof design of the case and mount resulted from the discovery that the headdress was losing many of the individual barbs that make up its feathers. They were found, to the horror of the conservators, lying on the sheet on which the headdress was previously supported. As well as deﬁning the speciﬁcations of its new vitrine, the conservation scientists who analysed the headdress also reported that the levels of vibration encountered in transporting it – by air, for example, to Mexico – could destroy its ﬁne and brittle feathers. > ...report was prepared by the same Austrian engineering company ... based on tests of the vibration in the gallery under different conditions, from a crowd of visitors and a glass cleaning .... All this can be mathematically predicted, and the more the vibration, the larger the container necessary to counter that vibration, according to the laws of physics. 1: https://www.academia.edu/31390854/The_Inbetweenness_of_the_Vitrine_Three_parerga_of_a_feather_headdress https://www.academia.edu/31390854/The_Inbetweenness_of_the_V...

dpark 9y ago
> Just put it on some shock absorbers in a container and send it across the ocean, it's not going to be accumulating damage in shipping for decades as it is in the museum. I agree it's a lame excuse. At some point they moved the headdress into the case they engineered so clearly it's possible to move the headdress without it instantly falling apart. Although I always find these requests to return artifacts a little odd anyway. On the one hand, yes, it's part of your heritage and I totally get why you want it returned. On the other hand, if ownership was transferred legally (gifted or sold rather than plundered), I don't see that you have any legitimate claim of ownership. Imagine if France asked for the Statue of Liberty back.
- kobeya 9y ago
  Moving it a few meters in a controlled environment is vastly different from moving it a few thousand kilometers though turbulent air, choppy sea, and stop-and-go city traffic.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  > ownership was transferred legally (gifted or sold rather than plundered) A legal transfer between equals is one thing. I agree that should be permanently binding. Even if the depreciation of the funds used to purchase the asset and the appreciation of the asset itself make the transaction seem one-sided. But this headdress belonged at one time to the emperor who reigned between 1502 and 1520...in 1521 Cortes conquered the Azteks. Whether it was 'gifted' or 'purchased', it doesn't seem possible to have a particularly legitimate transaction in whatever exchange took place. Perhaps a fair transaction would involve comparing the cost of the actual purchase of the item (which may have involved a one-sided transfer) to a later transaction of a similar item between equals. If a settler purchased a hundred acres of land from a native for a string of beads valued at 9 cents, but settlers sold each other land for $1.25 an acre, and those hundred acres are now worth $300k then perhaps a court could agree that the original sale was invalid and offer to allow the land to be repurchased for somewhere between 300k and the equivalent transaction of 300,0000 x 9 / 1250 = $2,160. Or, in the case of this headdress, they could do a little reenactment. Give the Mexicans some canons, black-powder muskets, and chemical weapons, and the Austrians some flint knives, and set them on opposing sides of a remote rain forest. See what sort of price they can come to agree upon.

kobeya 9y ago

It was originally transported when those feathers were relatively fresh. Now they are 500 years old. Feathers aren't meant to survive that long and remain structurally sound. When Tutankhamun's tomb was found, there were these beautiful beaded sandals that had been preserved exactly as they had been left for 3,200 years. When the archaeologist or assistant (I forget) went to pick them up to transport away, the thing burst apart collapsing into a pile of unordered beads. The strands that had been used to construct it had deteriorated to dust hundreds or thousands of years earlier and the sandals were held together only by the static configuration of the beads. Picking it up changed the relative angle of "down", and boom. Edit: Corrected date.