Novgorod

I just came across an interesting article about a site in Novgorod, Russia where they are constantly excavating a series of unusual objects: birch bark documents. They date anywhere from the 11th to the 15th century which is a great deal older than any non-religious paper-based documents and contain a wide variety of information. They survived not only due to the material of the bark, but also because they are carved instead of written in ink which, as we all know, can fade. They did dry out over time, but the process of fitting the fragments back together is fascinating. The pieces have to be humidified and pressed, and then they are fitted together with a special glue. I know, the idea of gluing such ancient documents made me shudder too, but according to the article "scientists spent almost as much effort searching for the best glue as they did on deciphering the documents themselves," so perhaps it's not too horrible.

The main source of my interest, though, is the ridiculous amount of information that these documents can provide to historians. The linguistics alone are enough of a find so as to aid with further translations in other types of documents and artifacts. There's also many "legal" documents such as receipts and even a police report. It was also pointed out, much to my amusement, that the documents with writing lessons on them that were carved by school children are covered in doodles which suggests that kids back then doodled during their classes just like we did. All in all it's remarkable the amount of information these documents can teach us and they apparently keep coming across more, something like 18 additional documents are found and assembled each year.

As I like to leave you with questions, mine is this: With their unusual material construction, would these documents be better off in the collection of a museum or an archive?


The main article is here http://www.geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/linguistic-geography/birch-bark-documents-from-novgorod-russia. You can look at the individual pieces and others like them through the embedded links. All the other reports I could find were in Russian, so we might need Sarah's help for those ;)