Destroying a copy can erase the only public record of an original.
Evidence
Some of the statues were replicas — the originals had already been moved to Baghdad for safekeeping. What was destroyed was, in some cases, a simulacrum. The destroyed “idol” was not the thing itself. This did not make the act less destructive, because the photographs and films documenting the originals had never been publicly archived — and so the record of what the originals had looked like depended on the replicas being intact. Destroying the copy destroyed the only publicly accessible record of the original. — Jamal Awil, The Whispering Archive, 431
Categorization
- XREF: Feeds directly into the archive’s ‘secondary witnesses’ holding in Beat 4 — copies as the only record. — connects to: Colonial archives deliberately destroyed documents deemed too sensitive or lowly to preserve; Archival misplacement can expose documents stripped of their official framing
Related
- Archival misplacement can expose documents stripped of their official framing (similarity 0.82)
- Colonial archives deliberately destroyed documents deemed too sensitive or lowly to preserve (similarity 0.79)