Re: [Archport] Digest Archport, volume 58, assunto 20

["Sónia Couto" <sonia.couto@gmail.com>]

Já agora, por lapso não referi que as mesmas provas decorreram na
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto.

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 12:00 PM,  <archport-request@ci.uc.pt> wrote:
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> Tópicos de Hoje:
>
>   1. Caça ao tesouro: testemunho (Alexandre Monteiro)
>   2. Tese de Mestrado em Museologia ( Sónia Couto )
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 00:54:26 +0100
> From: "Alexandre Monteiro" <no.arame@gmail.com>
> Subject: [Archport] Caça ao tesouro: testemunho
> Cc: ARCHPORT <Archport@ci.uc.pt>
> Message-ID:
>        <b72d69ac0807071654i4d4bad8co75d5617ed00a0342@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=WINDOWS-1252
>
> The Sunday Times, June 8, 2008
>
> Best of Times, Worst of Times: Frank Pope
>
> By Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe
>
> The amazing thing about gold is that it remains unchanged by sea
> water, even after hundreds of years. But once you've discovered it,
> gold fever seems to infect everyone around it. In 2001, I was
> excavating a 400-year-old Portuguese trading vessel known as a nao,
> who'd broken her back on a reef off a remote island off northern
> Mozambique and snapped in two. Her stern lay nestled in a little
> valley, 30 metres down, sealed from the water by large stones that had
> cascaded down on top. She was an important wreck, because very little
> is known about these early colonial excavation vessels ? the
> shipwrights' plans were destroyed by fires that swept through Lisbon
> in 1755, so the only way we can work out how they were built is from
> remains left on the sea bed.
>
> Once you break open the "time capsule" of a shipwreck and expose the
> timbers to oxygenated water, nothing stops the decay. It's a race
> against the clock to get as much information as possible before it
> disintegrates. When we lifted the stones off the nao, the timbers
> underneath were a wonderful Iberian oak, dark and strong, with marks
> where the carpenters' adzes had struck. Every few days we lifted
> sections to the surface and studied them. It was paradise, working on
> a beautiful wreck in clear waters with a tight team of divers who were
> passionate about shipwrecks.
>
> We heard a rumour that a local spear-fisherman had found gold near the
> site. But I was sceptical ? the reef was within wading distance of the
> shore. How could gold have sat unnoticed for some 400 years? We
> dropped metal detectors onto the sea bed where the bow of the ship had
> broken off, and the volcanic rock had made huge long tubes down into
> the sea bed. Then one of the team, Alejandro, put his detector over a
> hole and instantly it started screeching.
>
> He put his hand in and pulled out loaf-of-bread-sized stones and
> clouds of sand. His arm went deeper and deeper until, suddenly, there
> was a pristine ingot of gold sitting on his fingertips.
>
> I was astonished. Underwater, gold is absolutely staggering ? the
> colour leaps out; it's surreally bright. Even a little fleck sparkles
> in water. We crowded our masks around his hand, to get as much of an
> eyeful of this colour as we could. Alejandro carried on digging. The
> rest of us had nothing to do but sit and watch, but there was an
> impatience now from the other divers. They were pawing the ground and
> climbing over stones. Behind their masks they were manic ? I've never
> forgotten that look. There was a desperation in the way they were
> turning over rocks and sweeping away sand. Archeology is about doing
> things calmly, and this sudden frenzy made my heart sink ? I could
> sense trouble.
>
> Fourteen kilos of ingots came up in the end, but they left me
> completely cold. In archeology, you look for the human story, in order
> to peer into the minds of people from the past and their world. This
> gold was without any artistic value or the imprints of whoever made it
> or who for. But the power it held over the expedition members was
> intense.
>
> The island was a dangerous place to be with treasure: people had guns,
> and if anyone got a sniff of this news it would be easy to find us. We
> hid the gold under floorboards and tried to clamp everyone's mouth
> shut, but the divers wanted to celebrate. Suddenly we had people
> telling others not to drink in the local bar, in case their tongues
> loosened. Rifts started to appear; insanity crept in. There were
> tensions and accusations and people not getting on. When you're a
> small, tight team, that's oppressive.
>
> When the company who were financing us heard about the discovery,
> things got worse. They sent a guy from the UK to join our team to
> "help us along". After a week he admitted he was there to spy on us
> and make sure we weren't finding more gold than we were telling them.
> We were outraged. At least he'd been honest with us, but he kept
> disappearing to make reports on his satellite phone, so we knew he was
> watching at all times. And the trip was no longer about uncovering the
> wreck's story: we were ordered to search every square foot of the reef
> crest for gold.
>
> I begged to finish excavating the wreck first. Gold doesn't corrode in
> sea water, so it made sense to study the ship's timbers first. That
> was not what they wanted to hear. And then we found an ingot had been
> hidden under nearby rocks in the past few days, and bigger cracks
> started to show. The wreck was in a delicate state and every day the
> timbers rotted and lost precious detail.
>
> It was utterly dispiriting. You put your heart and soul into this kind
> of work, and I'd had such high hopes for the project ? but it had
> turned into a treasure hunt.
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2008 11:58:52 +0100
> From: " Sónia Couto " <sonia.couto@gmail.com>
> Subject: [Archport] Tese de Mestrado em Museologia
> To: archport@ci.uc.pt
> Message-ID:
>        <a54692f10807080358o5dbfff39jfb459e81ff02edc6@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> No passado dia 26 de Junho, o Licº António Manuel Passos Almeida,
> prestou provas de mestrado em museologia, cuja dissertação se intitula
> : "Museu Municipal do Porto: Das Origens à sua Extinção (1836-1940)."
> Foi com muito agradado que estive presente e gostaria de manifestar
> publicamente os meus parabéns pelo seu excelente trabalho, que como
> seria de esperar teve aprovação com nota de Muito bom. Sem dúvida um
> grande contributo para a história da museologia em Portugal.
>
> Sónia Couto
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
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> Fim da Digest Archport, volume 58, assunto 20
> *********************************************
>