ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief account of the history and theory of some of the more successful treatments for waterlogged wood. A Danish conservator treatment of waterlogged wood has a surprisingly long history of development. Wet site archaeology seems to have its origins in Denmark in the early nineteenth century. In northern Denmark, peat cutters occasionally encountered well-preserved bodies, sometimes in oak coffins. The need for conservation must have become apparent immediately because the bodies must have begun to decay quickly upon exhumation, and the associated wooden objects and textiles would have distorted and crumbled on drying. Conservators found the boiling hot alum solutions difficult to work with and dangerous. B. Christensen began experiments with the much more slender oak timbers of the Danish Viking ships. A worldwide collaboration involving laboratories in Europe, Japan, North America, and Australia is continuing the comparative approach with several samples of wood each from a wide variety of sources.
