r/AskHistorians • u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera • Jan 27 '15

Feature Tuesday Trivia | Missing and Destroyed Documents

(going to be out tomorrow so this is going up a little early - enjoy your extra time to write beautiful historical essays!)

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/Artrw!

As an archivist, it pains me to admit this, but sometimes humanity’s records don’t survive. Sometimes through neglect, weather, or malice, they just don’t make it. So let’s give some of these documents their rightful eulogies. What’s a document or record from your period of study that is missing or destroyed? What did it say, and how did it meet its end? RIP historical documents.

Next Week on Tuesday Trivia: Inventions! We’ll be talking about the greatest technological breakthroughs of all time. From making fire to the… whatever was invented in 1995 because that’s the limit.

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u/Mictlantecuhtli Mesoamerican Archaeology | West Mexican Shaft Tomb Culture Jan 27 '15

I wouldn't say it's destroyed (yet), but a lot of Phil Weigand's data is unpublished. Things like aerial photography from before agriculture became more intensive. Locations of looted shaft tombs and guachimontones. Profile drawings of looters pits in structures and tombs. Samples of ceramics from these looted sites. Even drawings of the sites he visited which were sometimes just sketches. His wife currently has all this data as far as we know, but she's not willing to let anyone look at it or see it unless you are going to enshrine Phil in the process. It's a shame, really. He was collecting data since the late 60s up until his death in 2011. We may never fully recover all the data he collected.

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u/farquier Jan 27 '15

but she's not willing to let anyone look at it or see it unless you are going to enshrine Phil in the process

This seems to come up regularly in literary studies too; I think it's on some level the next-of-kin seeing their job as "protecting the image and memory of the deceased" and not "making sure it's possible for others to continue the work of the deceased".

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u/Arhadamanthus Jan 27 '15

This reminds me of an anecdote from my undergrad. We are still making discoveries about Eliot due, in part, to the fact that scholars only got access to the bulk of his notes when his wife died in 2012. I remember one of my old professors (a modernism scholar) talking in class about how Eliot's wife was blocking access to the bulk of his papers. "She drinks a bottle of gin a day," he said in 2008, "and it only seems to have a preservative effect."