In the first of two interviews on the ownership and
display of antiquities,the newly installed director of the American School
talks about the destructive effects of private collections
"AT THE
University of Cincinnati we passed a resolution in our department, which is
strongly focused on archaeology, that we would not accept the donation of any
antiquities from private sources into our department, and that we would not
accept funding for archaeological projects from collectors.
We all had
been in situations where we had witnessed terrible looting of archaeological sites.
Often the amount of devastation to an archaeological site is really
disproportionate to the loot that's recovered. People will do huge damage to a
site just to walk away with some coins, destroying sometimes the whole history
of an area in an evening with a bulldozer. There's hardly a field archaeologist
alive who hasn't seen that.
Some of us
have been in situations where we've had to post guards with guns over
archaeological sites at night, especially if we're digging in or around the
cemetery. These things because there's a market, there's a demand for
antiquities, and that market is largely fed through the introduction of new
antiquities, which pass up in a chain of transmission from small farmers
encouraged by higher level exploiters, who feed these finds into overseas
networks.
I think we
need to attack small-scale operations like eBay. You find thousands of hits for
illegal antiquities on eBay every day. Those may not be coming out of Greece
now, but they're coming out of certain Balkan countries; they're coming out of
Russia, the Near East. The business in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a real flood
of antiquities from those places into western markets.
An
unbelievable range of things is now being collected that was never collected
before, with huge values attached. Things that one used to be able to acquire
for hundreds of dollars are now on sale for tens of thousands of dollars.
The
antiquities laws in America are, in my view, ridiculous. They permit the
private ownership of archaeological sites and the exploitation of those sites.
If I am a farmer and I own an American Indian cemetery, something Late
Mississippian, 13th or 14th century after Christ with beautiful artefacts, I
can dig it. They're my property. I can sell them just as private property.
There are no restrictions whatsoever.
So we do
what we can do. We have a couple of organisations in the States that exist to
raise money to buy private property on which archaeological sites are located -
the Archaeological Conservancy. We buy sites and set them aside just to protect
them for the future.
There's
something of value in almost every place. In a country like Greece that's been
occupied for thousands and thousands of years, it's impossible to dig and not
find something. This is a matter for citizens and education and sociology, not
for law enforcement. We each need to be educated and take ethical positions.
I remember
when Jackie Kennedy started her Every Litter Bit Hurts in America campaign and
I thought, "Yeah right, people are going to stop littering." And they
did. It took a couple of decades, but they did. And that was through public
awareness, constant bombardment of the public message.
I've read
the documents from the 1820s when the [Greek] government was trying to organise
the archaeological service. What they were doing - and it was somewhat
successful - was appeal to national pride. It didn't work with everybody, but
there were people sending antiquities to form the national collection
established initially on Aegina.
At the same
time, work on the other end of the equation - make it harder to sell by
cracking down on law enforcement in the receiving countries. And that requires
a change in American attitudes.
It used to
be possible to take your antiquities into a local university department, talk
to a professor and say, "What is this? Is this real?" We don't do
that anymore. We tell them that we have no opinion. It's not our business. We
refuse to partake in the process. This is a role a person like myself can play
to make the process of commoditisation more difficult. I want a buyer to have
doubts about the authenticity of [an object]. It's the official policy of the
Archaeological Institute of America, which is the parent institution of the
American School in Athens.
There's an argument
to be made that it's better for an antiquity to stay in the country of origin
through purchase by a private collector than for it to leave. At least you
retain it in Greece. But that's different from what goes on in America and
Britain.
Museums form
support organisations - friends of the museum - and those are encouraged to
collect to buy. The purpose is that the museum, rather than directly buying the
objects, which they don't have the money to do anyway, can deny the
responsibility for the acquisition because it's purchased by the buyer. And the
private buyer then ultimately wills it or donates it to the museum and receives
tax benefits for so doing. So, in effect, everybody feels good.
I think some
of the most avid collectors are paying the highest prices and are fuelling
demand; they're driving the market. I don't want to see archaeological sites
destroyed. I want to learn as much about the past as possible.
My personal feeling is that antiquities are best
held by people for whom they offer the most meaning. It's not just the
Parthenon Marbles. Bulgarians have raised issues about silver plate that's held
in Greece. A big issue for Albanians is the helmet of Skanderbeg held in
Austria. Where is the helmet of Skanderbeg most naturally displayed - in Tirana
or Vienna? You can make an argument that it's a part of the history of the
Austrian empire and its expansion into the Balkans, but I think that it doesn't
have the emotional charge that it has for the Albanians, and it seems a crying
shame that there has to be a model of it in the museum in Tirana. Where do the
Parthenon Marbles look best? Where do they derive the most meaning?"
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