This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Conservation Science applies chemistry, physics and materials science to the examination, treatment and long term preservation of works of art, artifacts and other cultural heritage, its method identifying what an object is made of and how it is deteriorating in order to stabilize, repair and safely display it. The field emerged as a named discipline through early twentieth century collaboration between museum curators and scientists, marked by the First International Conference for the Study of Scientific Methods in the Examination and Conservation of Works of Art, held in Rome in 1930.
For an atlas of religion and belief, conservation science underlies the account, given elsewhere in this collection, of how a devotional or ritual object's material composition is identified and kept from decay. A relic, an icon, a manuscript or a ritual vessel survives to be studied at all only because its physical materials have been examined and stabilized, and conservation science is the discipline that identifies what such an object is actually made of and what threatens it.
That physical grounding is why the field matters here specifically. A sacred object's meaning to its tradition and its material survival are two separate questions, and conservation science answers the second one, on which every other account of the object ultimately depends.