Fixing stone in time: Making and measuring consolidants for heritage futures

Abstract

Stone consolidants have been used in conservation practices for decades, with an increasingly interdisciplinary scientific attention to their composition and performance. This article is an ethnographic account of the process of testing a new consolidant's efficacy, drawn from fieldwork and interviews with scientists and heritage professionals involved in a European project in 2013. I illustrate, in line with prior scholarship on laboratory time, how time is a central tool of laboratory control, which must be managed to produce evidence of consolidant efficacy. Yet the ‘fast time’ of controlled experimental conditions is also suspect for those working in the field of heritage. By tracing the temporal tensions between scientific evidence making, laboratory practice and heritage practitioners’ values, I illustrate that the project of materially fixing stone in time means intervening on heritage futures.