Scholars Describe ‘Incalculable Loss’ as Museum in Brazil Goes Up in Flames

The email from a friend and fellow Latin America researcher was alarming. Brazil’s National Museum, with its 20 million artifacts, including priceless fossils, mummies, historical documents, and audio recordings of indigenous languages, was in flames.

Mary C. Karasch, an emeritus professor of Latin American history at Oakland University who studies the history of Brazil’s indigenous people and enslaved Africans, rushed to her computer. She plugged the name of the museum and the word “fire” into a search engine. Transfixed and horrified, Karasch watched as flames shot into the air and unique artifacts crumbled to ash.

Witnessing the live coverage of the inferno, “I was grieving for the cultural loss for the anthropologists I knew and for the students who were doing their research there,” said Karasch, the author of Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850.

She also mourned “for all of the national history that had been collected over the centuries.” The 200-year-old museum was housed in a palace that served in the 1800s as the residence of both the Portuguese royal family and the Brazilian imperial family.

“It’s as if the White House and Museum of National History both went up in flames at the same time in Washington,” Karasch said. “It’s just an incalculable loss.”

One Brazilian anthropologist she reached out to described feeling like someone in the family had died.

The national museum, which is also part of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, housed a trove of irreplaceable items of value to scholars in fields as diverse as zoology, art history, anthropology, and history. Among the collections’ highlights: “Luzia,” a 12,000-year-old fossil of what is believed to be Brazil’s first human species; frescoes from Pompeii; Egyptian and Roman artifacts; dinosaur skeletons; and millions of butterflies.

Officials estimate that up to 90 percent of the collections were destroyed by the blaze, which broke out on Sunday evening from an unknown cause. Protesters, angered by reports of government neglect and an inadequate sprinkler system, surged outside the museum, which had fallen into disrepair before the fire.

In the United States, researchers who have frequented the museum anxiously monitored the internet as reports of the few items that were salvaged came in.

Paulo A. Buckup, an associate professor of zoology at the federal university, was among a few researchers who rushed into the burning building and pulled out the items they could reach before flaming debris began falling on them and forced them out.

In an interview on Thursday, Buckup said they had kicked in a door to enter the building and had been led through the dark by a museum technician. He pulled out mollusk holotypes — the specimens that serve as the “fingerprinting,” or global reference, for a given species. At the other end of the building, a colleague was in the invertebrate department gathering up crustaceans.

Meanwhile, the fire, burning on the two floors above them, was intensifying. Illuminated by the glow of the flames in the windows, they grabbed what they deemed to be the most irreplaceable objects, then rounded up hard drives from researchers’ computers.

“Things started falling, and we decided we had to get out of there,” Buckup said. “After that, there was not much that could be done, but by then there were two or three dozen people, including museum employees and university officials, forming a human chain to move everything they could. After that, it is a long, sad story, because with limited firefighting possibilities, the fire kept spreading.”

Buckup said they were able to save only a “tiny piece of what was lost.”

A September 3 entry on Buckup’s Facebook page, translated to English, said: “This is it. I’m going to take a bath to wash the soot and leftover coal and this miserable smell of fire and destruction.”

The professor is helping coordinate recovery and restoration efforts, urging researchers to share exhibit materials and museums to donate actual artifacts. Some students lost all of their work in the blaze, he said. Burning documents flew through the air on the night of the fire, some disintegrating into sparks.

The museum offers master’s and doctoral programs in social anthropology, archaeology, botany, geosciences, linguistics, and zoology.

The most important goal, Buckup said, is to find the resources and commitment to rebuild exhibits and allow scientists to get back to work — no small task, given the financial constraints facing his country and the devastation caused by the fire. Universities have been known to swoop in and hire away researchers after disasters that threaten careers, as they did after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005. Buckup is determined that won’t happen now.

Researchers worldwide who have benefited from the museum are sending photographs and drawings of the exhibits to help rebuild a visual archive. Among them is Alida C. Metcalf, a professor of history at Rice University, who teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Latin American history, with a focus on Brazil.

Metcalf said the artifacts in the museum helped bring to life the scenes she described in a book she co-authored about a German soldier in the 16th century. The book, The Return of Hans Staden: A Go-Between in the Atlantic World, describes his two expeditions to the Americas, his shipwreck and capture in Brazil, his brush with cannibalism and escape. The authors’ retelling of his life relies on the text and images from Staden’s first-person account, but the artifacts in the museum gave Metcalf a more colorful insight into the lives of Brazil’s indigenous people.

During her visits to the museum, Metcalf viewed elaborate feather headdresses that cascaded down the backs of their wearers, feathered skirts and beaded belts, masks and ceramic burial baskets, even stuffed specimens of the birds that populated the area.

“You often hear museums feel sterile or dead, but this was very alive. It was rooted to its place in a historical building in Brazil with artifacts from Brazil,” Metcalf said. “The sadness we’re all feeling is immense.”

Ana Carnaval, an associate professor of biology at the City University of New York who was born and raised in Rio, expressed the thoughts of many of the Brazil university’s alumni in a recent tweet:

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.