Conservation and Analysis on a Shoestring: Displaying Gut Parkas at the Polar Museum, Cambridge

This paper presents a low-cost conservation project from the Polar Museum, Cambridge, in which two Inuit gut parkas from the museum’s collection were prepared for display and analysed to identify their material components. The project relied on cultivating professional networks and adapting inexpensive mounting methods to get maximum value from a very small budget. The parkas were analysed with a range of techniques including scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDX), attenuated reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) and a novel low-cost and non-destructive protein analysis technique to identify species. The results of the analysis are presented along with an explanation of the inexpensive mounting system which was devised to display the parkas as they were originally worn. The advantages and limitations of using a networking approach to analysis are also discussed.