Are you freakin' kidding me!

I have read over the past few years that archaeologists really don't need to go to faraway places in order to dig up new discoveries. Rather, all they need to do is investigate the basements and old storage rooms of their sponsoring institutions or museums for their latest important find.

From my own personal experience working in the museum field, the things that are simply boxed up and forgotten in storage are simply amazing. And I have heard from colleagues, other instances of just such things occurring. That last scene in "Raider's of the Lost Ark" is not fiction.

However what the following article relates is, in my mind, above and beyond.

From Discovery News, September 14, 2015: Oldest, Longest Ancient Egyptian Leather Manuscript Found. According this report:

Nothing is known about the manuscript’s origins. The French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo bought it from a local antiquities dealer sometime after the WWI. Later it was donated to the Cairo Museum, where it was unrolled shortly before the outbreak of the WWII.*

Then it was boxed and forgotten. A 4000 year old Egyptian scroll boxed and forgotten. For more than 70 years! Granted, it was in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in the 1940s, but still! Please understand, this scroll was created around 2000B.C.! Two thousand years before the birth of Jesus Christ.

In this same vein, from ARCHAEOLOGY, March 7, 2016, a report that a collection of historic documents was found in a museum storehouse in Cairo. The documents detail exchanges between Egyptian authorities and early Egyptologists such as Gaston Maspero and even Howard Carter. As Hisham El Leithy, Director General of the Egyptian Antiquities Registration Center stated: “These are the oldest documents found in the history of the Antiquities Ministry.”**

The two examples above are set in Egypt and involve Egyptian artifacts. Please do not take this to mean that other places, other fields are free from censure. Every large, or even not so large, institution is guilty of holes in its collections management.

To make this point, we examine the following report from Ireland. From BBC News, March 21, 2016, it was reported that a bone from a brown bear was discovered and carbon dated back to 10,500 B.C. What makes this find so newsworthy is the "bone shows clear signs of cut marks from stone tools."*** Previous to this find, the earliest evidence of human occupation of Ireland was believed to be 6,000 B.C. This bear bone pushes the time of human occupation of Ireland back 4,500 years! Incredible!

So why did I include this news piece here? According to the BBC report, this special bear bone was first discovered in 1903 and then stored away in a museum in the 1920s. While not "lost" per se, apparently no one reviewed the inventory list until 2010, when the bone was "found" and tested, confirming its age and significance.

Please don't misunderstand, I am beyond delighted that these items have been rediscovered. It is exciting to imagine all the "new" finds waiting to be re-excavated from the depths of our museums. However, from Egypt to Ireland and from southern California to Hawai'i (from my personal experiences), examples of institutions "misplacing," "forgetting about," or just plan "losing" items of true historic value are not uncommon. Here we only highlighted three from recent news articles. I am sure I will encounter more.

 

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* http://news.discovery.com/history/archaeology/oldest-and-longest-ancient-egyptian-leather-manuscript-found-150914.htm

** http://archaeology.org/news/4241-160307-egypt-antiquities-documents

*** http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35863186