On Conservation as a Human Science

Conservators as first responders in a world where our cultural heritage is increasingly at risk

Conservation can be understood as a form of knowing; conservators extract meaning about the past from what remains, while noting what is missing and sometimes repairing it. In this erudite and virtuosic book, the historian Peter N. Miller imagines the outlines of a new, expansive notion of conservation that links the world around us—natural and man-made—to the world inside us—our genome, our memor...