zlacker

I wonder if any special care was required to cut a subfossilized 5000 year old piece of wood - does it get appreciably harder over time? Or was that not long enough?

Also interesting that they had to dry it out and the planks shrank by half. I wonder if they considered having to replace the liquid with something else, such as was done with the Vasa ship which was submerged for a few hundred years.

>>zdw+(OP)
Its always been my understanding that recovered timbers need some sort of fluid replacement. The Mary Rose had 19years of being sprayed with PEG.

https://maryrose.org/news/mary-rose-enters-final-phase-of-co...

For almost three decades since being raised from the Solent, the hull of the Mary Rose – Henry VIII’s 500-year-old flagship – has been continuously sprayed, first with chilled fresh water to remove salt and then with Polyethlene Glycol (PEG), a water soluble wax.

>>zdw+(OP)
This depends on the individual piece of wood. Bog oak can be incredibly tough as the fossilisation process has started and the minerals from the water deep into the wood.

Replacing the water with resins isn’t needed as the original shape won’t be retained (unlike a ship or relic). Care must be taken during the drying process to avoid warping though.

I grew up in the Fens and it every few years a farmer would uncover a piece of bog oak and leave it at the edge of a field.