Innumerable treasures of prehistoric civilisation are being lost to climate change as the Arctic permafrost melts, the British Museum has warned.
Rapidly rising temperatures in the Arctic are causing fragile artefacts locked in frozen ground for up to 30,000 years to be exposed, risking their swift destruction by coastal erosion and the elements.
At an event announcing the first UK museum show dedicated to the Circumpolar region, Jago Cooper, head of the Americas at the British Museum, said archaeologists had only a brief window of opportunity to locate and save this emerging trove of prehistoric human activity before it disappeared.
He compared the situation to the burning of the Library at Alexandria in Egypt in the classical era, a byword for cultural catastrophe. “You’re occasionally plucking a single book from the fire, but it’s a huge region . . . and it’s all coming out of the ground in one go. A lot of these objects which have been beautifully preserved, with bits of skin and bone and amazing remnants of a way of life, are being lost.”
The Citi exhibition “Arctic: culture and climate” will bring together the largest collection of artefacts from the region ever seen in the UK. It includes loans from the Yana Rhinoceros Horn site in Siberia, which has yielded an array of objects from 31,000 years ago, such as artistic carvings on mammoth tusks, needles for sewing skins and fur, and obsidian spearheads used for hunting.
The show will display historic and contemporary items showing how indigenous people in the circumpolar region have adapted to the impact of European and Russian exploration and the fur trade over the past 300 years, as well as climate change.
One is an Inuit or Greenlandic sled made from narwhal and caribou bone and pieces of driftwood, which was traded to John Ross on his 1818 expedition to discover the route of the North-West Passage. The encounter marked the first meeting between the Inughuit and Europeans.
The subject of the melting Arctic region has raised questions over the show’s lead financial supporter, Citi, which has helped to finance oil and gas projects around the world.
Asked if Citi was an appropriate supporter, Hartwig Fischer, British Museum director, said he could not comment directly on Citi’s business but added: “A lot of companies are thinking very intensely about how to invest.”
Mr Cooper said that when meeting Citi to discuss its potential support, he had told the bank: “Citi needs to think about the future, and the best way to do that is to understand the past.” Citi declined to comment.
The issue of climate change has dogged the British Museum in recent years in the context of its long-term relationship with BP, the UK oil and gas group, which supports an annual exhibition at the museum. A Greenpeace protest caused the temporary shutdown of the museum in 2016 after activists scaled the columns at its Bloomsbury entrance. BP’s cultural partnerships with Tate and the Royal Shakespeare Company ended in 2016 and 2019 respectively.
The Arctic exhibition opens on May 28 and runs until August 23.
