Mo’ loot, mo’ troubles

Alun Life, The Past 2 Comments , , , , ,

Archae­o­porn has an entry illus­trat­ing one of the prob­lems with buy­ing illi­cit antiquit­ies. It turns out that not all crim­in­als are trust­worthy people. Take for instance the Seal of Yzbl, it’s a seal of Queen Jezebel as men­tioned in the Bible™. At least it is if you don’t look at it too closely. If you do, then all sorts of oddit­ies appear — that’s not a prob­lem it was found at… umm… oh dear.

Archae­o­porn also men­tions the Guen­nol Lion, which I haven’t because I know noth­ing about it. David Gill in con­trast knows as much about its find spot as any­one else.

David Gill has also talked about the Bolton Prin­cess recently. If you don’t know this story, Bolton Coun­cil had the oppor­tun­ity to buy a statue of the Amarna Prin­cess, a 3000+ year old statue from Egypt. There was no check on the proven­ance and the sellers wish to remain anonym­ous. This is par for the course in antiquit­ies sales so far. Noth­ing more would have been heard were it not for the fact that the same sellers tried to sell some wall reliefs to the Brit­ish Museum and some spelling mis­takes were spot­ted. An invest­ig­a­tion fol­lowed and a search revealed three more Amarna Prin­cesses which had been knocked up over a few weeks by a bloke in a shed.

It’s pos­sible the Bolton Armana Prin­cess is a fake.

David Gill has a sens­ible and grown-up reac­tion to the news. Me, I’m reminded of the K Found­a­tion and want to applaud. The case sug­gests that the sting was about art rather than money. The per­pet­rat­ors were described as liv­ing in “abject poverty.” If there were a scheme to ensure the proven­ance of arte­facts for sale then maybe this wouldn’t hap­pen. I’m sur­prised that reput­able col­lect­ors and auc­tion houses aren’t clam­our­ing for such a scheme.

— and an update before this post goes live —

I write quite a few posts in advance, and this is one of them, so I can include another Green­halgh for­gery thanks to the Cranky Pro­fessor. The Art Insti­tute of Chicago has a Green­halgh Gaugin. These things could become col­lect­ible. If you can fake proven­ances, then how many unproven­anced antiquit­ies on dis­play are fake?

The answer depends on the question

Alun Politics, The Past No Comments , , , , ,

Pothunters looting
Pothunters des­troy­ing a site, or a prob­lem­atic excav­a­tion? Photo (cc) gbaku

David Gill has put up an inter­est­ing blog post show­ing how the kind of ques­tions you ask lead you to cer­tain kinds of answer. It’s really inter­est­ing to see how the assump­tions are skill­fully built into ques­tions. The ses­sion he picks apart is Tain­ted Objects, which tackles arte­facts of prob­lem­atic proven­ance. (If you’re won­der­ing what prob­lem­atic means: The evid­ence against OJ Simpson was prob­lem­atic.) The prob­lem starts with the title, he argues. How does being smuggled, or expor­ted with a nod and a wink, taint the arte­fact? The taint as he rightly says isn’t any­where in the arte­fact, it’s with the people who are happy to handle them. And that’s just the start.

He’s also linked to an inter­view with Jack Davis in Athens News. Davis is the new head of the Amer­ican School in Athens and the inter­view is start­ling from the open­ing:

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.

As I recall, and North Amer­ican read­ers are wel­come to cor­rect me if I’m wrong, Cin­ncin­nati is a major uni­ver­sity which could well expect to receive this kind of dona­tion. I know it’s easy to say that you shouldn’t fuel the mar­ket by accept­ing dona­tions from dodgy ‘phil­an­throp­ists’ and val­id­ate their pur­chases. How­ever when one col­lector, who is said to have bought arte­facts with dirt still on them, offered another uni­ver­sity up to $200 mil­lion for a new insti­tute, they took it. Say­ing no to dona­tions when oth­ers are accept­ing them does require huge amounts of integ­rity. (Note to the rel­ev­ant law­yers. I accept that being offered an arte­fact caked in dirt does not mean there’s any reason to assume it had been recently looted. In much the same way I’d like to reas­sure OJ’s law­yers that I have no doubt that their cli­ent was found inno­cent. I get email.)

The photo is titled “Pothunters” des­troy­ing an archae­olo­gical site on the Columbia River (Ore­gon, USA) and it’s one of the many put up on Flickr by gbaku. He’s been put­ting up some great images of archae­olo­gical excav­a­tion in action recently and, even bet­ter, they’re avail­able under a Cre­at­ive Com­mons licence.

An obsession with context

Alun The Past 2 Comments , , , ,

Fol­low­ing yesterday’s post on the roots of archae­ology, I’ve read an inter­est­ing post David Gill’s Loot­ing Mat­ters web­log about an obses­sion with con­text. The key quote is so good I can’t help lift­ing it:

“The archae­olo­gical community’s obses­sion with con­text puzzles numismatists.”

Lest you think the good pro­fessor is writ­ing with his under­pants on his head I should make clear it’s a quote from an art­icle he read. It makes more sense if you see numis­mat­ics as an heir of anti­quar­i­an­ism and archae­ology as a pre­tender. Archae­olo­gists are more likely study the pasts of peoples who simply don’t appeal to the wannabe-country gent. It would seem a bit odd though as not all numis­maticians are paro­chial in their studies.

Of course if you are a bit of a social dino­saur you may not have noticed chan­ging times. This might explain bizarre claims like:

“Numis­mat­ists believe that all coins carry use­ful inform­a­tion about the polit­ical, mil­it­ary and eco­nomic situ­ation at the time they were issued. Indeed, numis­mat­ists derive their own con­text from the study of design devices used on coins, the num­ber and chro­no­logy of dies used to strike given series, and the metal­lur­gical con­tent of vari­ous issues. For that reason, numis­mat­ists cat­egor­ic­ally reject the claim that coins lose value as his­tor­ical objects if the cir­cum­stances of their dis­cov­ery are not preserved.”

Ok, how wrong is this? For a start a coin can con­trib­ute to his­tor­ical research by examin­ing its art and its con­text. Lose that con­text and you lose the data. You can­not tell what arte­facts a coin was found with purely from its inscrip­tions, no mat­ter how intensely you study them.

But that’s only half the problem.

At the week­end in the times there was a com­par­ison between antiquit­ies loot­ing and ivory smug­gling in the Times. It is an apt com­par­ison. The death toll in ele­phants can be dis­pro­por­tion­ate to the amount of ivory recovered. Sim­il­arly an increase in coin sup­ply from Bul­garia, sorry Thrace, ((Export­ing coins from Bul­garia, as well as Greece or Tur­key, the other two coun­tries which could be described as Thrace, is illegal. Unfor­tu­nately if you list the coin as Thra­cian then it’s extremely dif­fi­cult to find where the source is and hence can­not launch a pro­sec­u­tion. You’d have to be a pretty shady char­ac­ter to do that though so you wouldn’t expect to find any­thing if you check Ebay for Thra­cian coins would you?)) may be con­nec­ted with the bull­doz­ing of archae­olo­gical sites in Thrace Bul­garia. The fact that this sort of thing is illegal has led some people to con­clude that crim­in­als might be involved with the antiquit­ies supply.

It’s not a thought that occurs to all deal­ers, nor it seems all numis­mat­ists. The trade relies on deal­ers and law­yers who don’t think too hard about the con­text of their finds. Read David Gill’s thoughts on the sub­ject and laugh or cry.