Our souls, dependent upon / their / nurture, now shrink, wizened. / Our minds, formed / and informed by their / radiance, fall away. / We are not so much maddened / as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of / dark, cold / caves. – Maya Angelou, “When Great Trees Fall”
Museums are great trees in the forests of our society. They stand tall as accumulations of years of societal and scientific growth. They hold the forest’s story deep inside them–stories we can tap into. The fruit they produce can sustain and enrich human life. And, within the knots and scars each carries, diverse niches can survive for us to treasure and learn from. When one of these trees fall, our forest shrinks and suffers. What the tree held within is lost to the forest forever.
On September 2, 2018, we lost another one of these trees–the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The incredible devastation of the museum’s collections have been traumatic for not just the people of Brazil, but our worldwide community as well. The fire dealt a big blow to the scientific community, and decimated tenuous links to Brazil’s indigenous histories.
History and Tragedy
The Museu Nacional is Brazil’s oldest scientific institution. Founded in 1818 by King Joao VI of Portugal, it was moved into its current residence in 1902. The palace the museum inhabited was built in 1803 and was once the residence of the Portuguese royal family. Brazil’s independence decree was signed at the palace in 1822, and it remained a post-independence imperial palace until 1889.
Today, the museum is managed by the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), and it is well-known for its scientific education and research. At its peak, it held over 20 million items–roughly twice the size of the British Museum’s collections. Before the fire, the museum was home to some of the most unique and revered natural and cultural history artifacts in Latin America–and the world.
Then there was the fire.
On Sunday, September 2, 2018, a fire broke out at the Museu Nacional. The cause is still unclear. Some reports claim a paper balloon propelled by a small flame landed on the roof; others cite a potential short-circuit in one of the museum’s laboratories. Whatever the cause, a blaze developed rapidly, consuming the palace. Museum staff and researchers tried to rescue whatever items they could. After the smoke cleared, the scope of the damage was staggering: an estimated 90% of the museum’s collection was gone.
Who’s to Blame?
In the days following the Museu Nacional fire, a lot of discussion has surrounded the reasons for such a catastrophic event. To many people outside Brazil, it seemed like a random act of chaos in the universe. In reality, however, this disaster was almost inevitable.
Brazil has a history and reputation for neglecting public institutions. Scandal, corruption, and systematic disinvestment of state and federal governments has crippled public institutions like the Museu Nacional. While Brazil’s been hot to invest in the 2016 Olympics and a “Museum of Tomorrow,” public, scientific, and cultural infrastructure have suffered. Amendments to Brazil’s Constitution froze public investments for 20 years. Museums and other institutions now have to rely on public investment–something that’s becoming increasingly difficult as poverty in Brazil continues to swell.
UFRJ has been fighting to keep Museu Nacional afloat. They lobbied successfully for $8.6M in funding in 2014, but none of that was disbursed. Brazil’s National Development Bank committed to $5M in improvements, but that hadn’t been disbursed and utilized yet.
This lack of funding had a serious impact. Waves of issues plagued the museum over the past 20 years, from flooding to pest infestations. In 2017, a severe termite problem shut down their dinosaur exhibit, and the museum actually had to crowdfund cleanup costs.
Museu Nacional suffered serious deterioration of its infrastructure as well. It lacked sprinklers and smoke detectors; structural issues, exposed wiring, etc. were endemic. But it wasn’t just the museum that suffered–nearby utilities were also impacted. When firefighters arrived, all the nearby hydrants were dry, and they had to resort to dredging a nearby pond.
All the fuel was in place for the scale of devastation this fire caused–the match just needed to be lit. Museum staffers foresaw this danger long ago and had made attempts to move the collections out of the palace. However, the expense of such a move wasn’t feasible due to Museu Nacional’s budgetary issues. As a result, we are where we are today.
Artifacts In Memoriam
Officials are still sorting through the rubble, but staff and researchers have begun discussing collections and artifacts likely destroyed in the blaze. Here is a short list of just a handful of those items, in three broad categories: natural history, cultural history, and data.
Natural History
Luzia
Luzia is the oldest human skeleton known from the Americas–roughly between 11-12,000 years old. Her skull and other bone fragments may represent early human migrations into South America and are therefore critical in understanding that aspect of human history. While there’s a possibility her skull was found in the museum ruins, more testing needs to be done.
Entomological Collections
Museu Nacional boasted an incredible entomology collection. During the fire, the floor underneath the collection collapsed, likely destroying five million butterflies, arthropods, and other insects. This includes their lace bug collection, which was the largest in the world. Included within that collection were holotypes representing 25% of the known Brazilian lace bug species.
Mollusks
The museum had a large mollusk collection that suffered in the fire. Researchers who went in to save what specimens they could were able to gather about 80% of the holotypes. However, hey were unable to salve much else from the collection.
Geology/Mineralogy
As of this moment, museum staff believe the museum’s geology collection to be a total loss. It contained over 7500 specimens, and was important in the early days of mineralogy. Gathered by Carl Eugenius Pabst von Ohain–an 18th century mining inspector–the collection was the basis of two influential books by German mineralogist Abraham Gottlob Werner.
Paleontology
The cabinets that housed most of the museum’s paleontological collections were metal, and may have survived the fire. Unfortunately, there’s no guarantee their contents did. Fossils are fragile to begin with; when subject to intense heat and water, adhesives will dissolve, swelling will cause fractures, identification information will wash off, and mold can develop.
The museum housed a number of holotype specimens, and held a large collection of pterosaurs. Some of the specimens potentially lost for good include:
- Maxakalisaurus
- Santanaraptor
- Tapejara
- Tupandactylus
- Tupuxuara
Staffers and researchers need more time to evaluate the damage to the paleontological collections. But any losses are devastating to a field where scant specimens are commonplace.
Cultural History
While the natural history collections experienced horrible losses, the most impactful and devastating damage occurred to the Museu Nacional’s cultural history collections.
Egyptian Artifacts
The Museu Nacional had the biggest collection of Egyptian Artifacts in Latin America–over 700 items. Highlights included five mummies, one of which was in its original coffin. It’s still questionable, at this point, if any part of the collection survived the fire.
Items from Slavery-Era Brazil
Gone are items representing Brazil and Latin America’s role in the world-wide slave trade. One in particular–a stool gifted to King Joao IV by the Dahomey king Adandozan–was emblematic of the relationship between the Old World and the New, as well as the systemic nature of slave economics.
Indigenous Histories, Cultures, and Languages
Of the losses the Museu Nacional Fire caused, artifacts and items from indigenous Brazilian peoples are the worst casualty. The museum had over 40,000 items pertaining to more than 100 ethnic groups, all gathered from expeditions into remote areas of the Amazon in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many of these items still needed study in collaboration with elders of those ethnic groups. Now, that collaboration is no longer possible.
The fire likely consumed consequential work from the German ethnologist Curt Nimuendaju as well. He spent years among the Ticuna and other indigenous Brazilian groups, amassing a collection of notes, letters, and expeditions journals. There were also maps he drew that contained information about the languages and locations of groups he’d come in contact with. Researchers digitially preserved the original map, but not one Nimuendaju updated and corrected.
Brazil has struggled in preserving the ethnic cultures that make up the nation’s rich history, and this fire has been a horrifying setback. The Museu Nacional housed some of the last known artifacts from Brazil’s indigenous peoples. This includes their language–the museum had a collection of analog recordings of indigenous languages whose native speakers no longer exist. None made it to a digital format, and are now permanently inaccessible.
Data
Paper (and perhaps electronic) records likely did not survive. The same goes for the specimen labels, and without these, recovery gets far more complex. Retroactively identifying a specimen is error-prone. Moving forward without this critical data is going to be a major challenge for the museum staff and researchers.
So…What Now?
Well, there is good news in all of this: 10% of the collection remains. A separate building housing the museum’s vertebrate specimens, herbarium, and library all survived. As well, efforts are underway to accumulate and preserve data about the museum’s collections. Student groups and Wikipedia have begun efforts to gather images and 3D models of as many of Museu Nacional’s specimens as possible, helping curb the fire’s impact.
However, the Museu Nacional Fire dealt a massive blow to scientific research. Just to complete a partial restoration of the museum’s collections, UNESCO estimates it could take 10 years or more. The museum’s laboratories need rebuilding, as well as all their research. Scientists and researchers around the globe have lost access to exploring and understanding our culture and this planet we live on.
The fall of this great tree has left a gaping hole in the canopy of our global forest. Now erased are critical parts of our cultural and natural histories. We find ourselves forced back into dark, cold caves. We’ll go on from this, but the Museu Nacional Fire damages the body of knowledge we’ve spent thousands of years developing.
In the meantime, we need to redouble our efforts to protect and modernize our museums, archives, libraries, and other public institutions. In First-World Western countries, there’s an arrogant thought that something as devastating as the Museu Nacional Fire couldn’t happen here. That assertion is false. Even here in the United States, we’re seeing our government pulling funds from critical scientific efforts, national parks, and so on. Through political action, advocacy, and investment, we can save the great trees before it is too late.
Header image credit: Felipe Milanez, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)