ヴァイキング船を動かす…

考古学者、歴史学者、さらには北欧を旅したことがあるならご存知でしょうが、オスロの博物館にはヴァイキング時代の発掘された船がいくつか展示されています。外板がよろい張り（クリンカー）で作られたヴァイキング船は映画や写真などでも良く見かけます。Osebergの船は特に有名でしょう。
約１０００年以上も前に作られた船が現在の博物館から移動することが検討されています。首都にある博物館のほうが交通の便が良く、また入場者数も多いことが移動の利点です。１９世紀から２０世紀にかけて発掘された船は保存処理を施されましたが、当時の技術ですから発掘以降劣化が進んでいます。現在のテクノロジーで保存は可能ですが、専門家はこの移動の際に一部壊れたりしないかと移動に反対を示しています。北欧（特にヴァイキング）の文化は船なしには語れなく、発掘された船は貴重な遺産として親しまれています。移動中にもしものことがあれば大変です。慎重にいろいろな方法を考え、もしくは移動が本当に必要かも考えなければなりません。

Plan to move Viking ships raises dire predictions

By Walter Gibbs
New York Times News Service
OSLO, Norway — The University of Oslo has decided to move three grand Viking ships, probably by truck and barge, to a new museum across town despite dire claims that the thousand-year-old oak vessels could fall apart en route.
A retired curator of Oslo’s current Viking Ship Museum said the delicately preserved ships, two of which are nearly 80 feet long, were almost equal in archaeological importance to the pyramids.
“Even if I have to live till I am 100, I will go on fighting this move,” the former curator, Arne Emil Christensen, 70, said in an interview. “The best way to stop it is still through diplomacy, but, if necessary, I will be in front of the ships, chained to the floor.”
The university’s board of directors voted, 8-3, this month to move the sleek-hulled vessels over the objections of Christensen and several other Viking Age scholars, including the former director of the British Museum, David Wilson, and the director of Denmark’s Center for Maritime Archaeology, Ole Crumlin-Pedersen. The board wants to transport the popular ships from a remote Oslo peninsula where they have been housed for more than 75 years to a large, multifaceted museum in the center of the capital.
The three ships were pulled in pieces from separate Viking burial mounds more than a century ago, then painstakingly reassembled with rivets, glue, creosote and linseed oil. Since then they have deteriorated markedly. Christensen said they have the consistency of knekkebrod, a type of Norwegian cracker.
The most spectacular of them, the Oseberg ship, was built around the year 800 and has enlivened the covers of many history books. Its towering, carved snakehead prow and 30 oars offer insight on the old English prayer, “Deliver us, O Lord, from the fury of the Norsemen.” Viking raiders carried by such ships were the scourge of Britain and much of the European continent from the 8th to the 11th centuries.
Engineers from Det Norske Veritas, a risk management foundation, have modeled the Oseberg ship by computer and concluded it could be moved “with little probability of damage” if a gyroscopically controlled cradle is designed to bear all five tons of oak without the slightest stress or tilt. The most likely travel route would be in three segments: downhill by truck for 750 yards, across the Oslo Fjord by barge for 2.5 miles, and uphill by truck again for several hundred yards.
“It will be a dramatic day, for sure, but I will stay calm,” said the University of Oslo president, Geir Ellingsrud. “I am convinced that the move will take place without significant problems.”
The ships will not set out immediately. Their proposed new home is not due to open until 2015. The commitment to move them, which assumes a safe technique will be developed, was required before architectural planning and budgeting for the new museum could begin.
The Oseberg ship’s rival for the attention of museumgoers is the more workmanlike Gokstad ship, dating to around 890. Its strakes, ribs and keel have not been analyzed for strength. The third vessel, called Tune, is really only half a ship; but what remains came out of the ground in one piece, held together by the original iron rivets. The most brittle objects are a ceremonial sleigh and a wheeled wagon found in the Oseberg ship.
“We simply don’t know what may happen if these things are moved,” said Christensen, an archaeologist who recently retired as the ships’ curator and has not yet been replaced. “In my opinion, we run the risk of serious damage to both the ships and the artifacts.”
Ellingsrud, a mathematician, said Christensen and his colleagues were exaggerating the risk “out of emotion” stemming from their long association with the ships. He acknowledged that they had one more card to play without turning to civil disobedience. Norway’s Directorate of Cultural Heritage has the power to declare landmarks untouchable and is evaluating whether the current Viking Ship Museum and its contents should be protected as one monument.
“The point of no return has not been reached yet,” Ellingsrud said.

引用元：http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,650217892,00.html