We're about to make a wood and charcoal storage room with controlled air temperature and humidity. What are the recommended conditions? We have modern and archaeological wood sections and pieces, and archaeological charcoal. No special artifacts (paintings, sculptures, etc.), just wood and charcoal remains and construction wood.
Simply you should store them in conditions same as where you retrieved them. Commonly, best temperature is about that of refrigerator, but humidity same as retrieved site.
For sample storage two important things should be considered. 1- All the samples which may change shape, like cores, should be fixed, then dried.2- Fragile samples, such charcoals, should store in a place with the lowest temperature and humidity fluctuations and not lower than 0 degrees of C.
If archaeological wood is waterlogged, it should be stored in water, at 4°C, in the dark and with fungicides in the water. All these conditions are important to avoid loss of water, deformations and development of biological attacks. It is important that the temperature does not reach 0°C: it may cause microcracks inside wood due to the formation of ice.
In case of charcoal, obviously water is not necessary but dark and temperature around 4°C are recommended.
Please let me have more details. It all depends upon condition (level of degradation, maximum water content, presence of iron salts etc.). Size is a big issue here. Smaller fragments will suffer considerably less damage on drying than larger structural timbers. Charcoal will be fine but if it is simply "charred" and not charcoal you may have problems with the charred surface falling of a shrinking core of un-burned wood.
There is a huge literature out there about drying, conserving, consolidating and storing archaeological wood of all conditions. Google WOAM and PEG. The RH of the storage environment depends entirely on the condition of your specimens and how they were consolidated and dried!
The Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research has some information posted on this http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/collection/ and the curator, Pearce Paul Creasman, had a paper on this topic in the journal Tree-Ring Research, published by the Tree-Ring Society, now through Allen Press. http://www.treeringsociety.org/ I think the article appeared in the last couple years, so the only way to get it free is to contact Mr. Creasman via the LTRR link (issues through 2006 are online). I'm sure the tree-ring forum has discussions on this topic as well. It can be searched via this link
http://listserv.arizona.edu/archives/itrdbfor.html
Lastly, I'd be sure to check Henri Grissino-Mayer's informative web resource:
http://web.utk.edu/~grissino/
Pat Pringle
Did you already check the "Waterlogged wood. Guidelines on the recording, sampling, conservation and curation of waterlogged wood" edited by English Heritage?
http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/waterlogged-wood/
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