Scrap ARPA and set up a Portable Antiquities Scheme for the USA?

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Over in the US collectors and dealers somewhat repetitively assert some such nonsense as the Witschonke premise which is the US should do nothing to help nations whose archaeological heritage (I think he means "coins") is threatened by looting until they adopt measures to protect that heritage approved by the USA. In his opinion, that is the adoption of the "British system" of a Treasure Act and a voluntary 'portable antiquities scheme'. Yesterday we saw the same proposal again being put out by an ACCG coin dealer:

The Treasure Act and Portable Antiquities Scheme which prevail in the United Kingdom are the best (and almost the only) existing example of intelligently devised, successful antiquities laws, and in my view something resembling this should be universally adopted. Although the existing political climate does not favor such a sensible and practically motivated resolution of differences, I believe that the adoption of a global Treasure Act and Portable Antiquities Scheme, with appropriate adjustments for the individual concerns of States presently restricting private ownership of and export of archaeological antiquities, would do far more to control looting of archaeological sites than any possible combination of repressive and punitive measures.

It is really quite tiresome to have these Americans attempting to dictate to the whole world how they 'should' run their affairs, or they will not get the Uncle-Sam-Seal-of-Approval. Instead of telling everybody else what to do and expecting them to jump when ordered to jump, maybe they could lead the way by example. Set the moral lead. Quite obviously before dictating what others 'should' do, they should first set up such a system in their own country before encouraging others to do the same. The USA has considerable problems with looting of archaeological sites by artefact collectors. The undocumented exploitation of otherwise unthreatened archaeological sites by lithics collectors and pot diggers is a source of damage to the archaeological record in the USA. While it is restricted by law on public and 'Indian' lands which vests control of archaeological material there to the state (just as much as in Egypt, Greece or any other source countries), this does not stop the looting, and the losses to the archaeological record due to site exploitation on private land to serve the expanding collector market are also considerable. I read an account of a US archaeologist who said that in many regions of the USA there is not a single ancient site within walking distance of a means of access which had not been visited and searched by arrowhead hunters. According to him, they are being collected away just as surely as the sites in the Sahara. So US legislation is not protecting the archaeological record there from undocumented damage by collectors and looters.

Perhaps then US antiquity dealers would like to draft a proposal to change US legislation to take into account the proposal that state ownership of archaeological remains is not stopping looting in places like the Four Corners area and does nothing to stop the destruction of sites on land not owned or administered by the state. Let them propose a system like the British one which they insist is the "only intelligent way forward" for OTHER countries. Let them first apply it at home. Why don't they?

How would 'Treasure' be defined in terms of native American and Early Colonial artefacts? In order to make sense and selectively get archaeologically significant items vested in the state it would have to cover archaeologically significant artefacts and assemblages of all the ancient cultures of the country, from Archaic campsites, western pueblos and caves, Woodland and Moundbuilder sites of the east, as well as artefacts from early colonial forts, settlement and trade routes. Once a list of such items has been drawn up and agreed, all that is needed is for the dealers and collectors force the scrapping of scrap the Archaeological Resources Protection Act and related measures and institute their new National Treasures Act which defines state ownership of the designated artefact types, and lays down the process of an inquest and museum acquisition, with the full market value being split between finder and landowner (where the latter is the state, the finder only getting his due share). Just like the British model they want OTHER countries to adopt.

Then to set up a US Portable antiquities Scheme state-wide to cover all the thousands of non-Treasure items found annually by artefact hunters and members of the public, arrowheads, baskets, potsherds, colonial artefacts. How would that be organized to give equivalent coverage to that in the UK? How many Finds Liaison Officers would there have to be to cover the entire USA? What is the optimum distance between them, where would they be based (museums, academic institutions, parks services)? Who would finance it and co-ordinate its activities, and how much would it actually cost?

It seems to me that unless US collectors and dealers are willing to take steps to introduce such a system into the administrative system of their own country and iron out all the problems that would arise from doing this (making the "appropriate adjustments for the individual concerns of States" in the case of their own), then they really should refrain from making comments about what they think other ('source') nations should be doing to accommodate the US market in dugup antiquities. The Witschonke Premise is a bankrupt premise while US dealers and collectors steadfastly refuse to even consider putting it into action in the case of their own country. It is just the epitome of US hypocrisy.

The US antiquities market has a turnover of millions of dollars annually, their lobbyists have access to considerable resources. If they really believe in the Witschonke Premise, let them commission a feasibility study from the Cultural Property Research Institute, or a real academic institution such as the Capitol Archaeological Institute (CAI) at George Washington University, or maybe the Getty Institute to scrap the ARPA and replace it by a system modelled on the 'exemplary' and 'intelligent' British legislation and then submit it to public consultation. Let us see some honest and transparent debate developing in place of the hypocrisy and glibness that characterises the position of the US no-questions-asked-marketeers.

'Chasing Aphrodite' And Other Dirty Art World Deals

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The forthcoming book "Chasing Aphrodite" is the subject of a skilful marketing campaign with a lot of pre-publication hype, deservedly so, the extracts show it to be well-written and the subject is an important one. "Chasing Aphrodite" tells a big story about 'major antiquities' and highlights a more general problem, though one which is on the way to being resolved as museums look to their acquisition policies and get ethical. No longer are sale of 'big' items with no provenance (the no-questions-asked market model) as acceptable to public institutions as they were. Now of course we have the problem of the made-up provenances [collecting histories] and the existence of a not-enough-questions-asked institutional market.

The big problem however is still at the other end of the market, the hundreds of thousands of so-called "minor artefacts" dug out of the archaeological record and "surfacing" (from 'underground'?) on the market by various illicit means and being sold to private collectors who still function in no-questions-asked mode alongside items legitimately on the market. It is this whole process, more insidious and just as damaging as the trade in 'big' Getty-worthy items, which needs closer scrutiny. It ranges from the smuggling of shabtis and scarabs, to the bulk lots of metal-detected coins and artefacts stripped from Roman sites in the Balkans to the legalised stripping of archaeological sites of metal artefacts by metal detectorists in England under a misguided policy of tolerance.

But for the moment, let us plug the big story, as setting the scene for the time when the general public can be persuaded to look more closely at what is happening day after day to the so-called 'minor artefacts' that are being gouged destructively out of the world's archaeological record for entertainment and profit. Because this can only happen as long as the public allows it to.

There is a nice pre-publication interview and article on National Public radio (NPR) called 'Chasing Aphrodite' And Other Dirty Art World Deals. The interview well worth listening to (the article is a summary, not a transcript). It talks of the "object lust' which led to the Getty Museum acquiring contextless 'art' objects from dubious sources, from back alleys to basement bank vaults. Author Frammolino says that the "overpowering effects of antiquity" lead to excesses

"People who come in contact with antiquities — the history of it, the beauty of these antiquities, the thought that maybe somebody great had once possessed this — they lose reason," he tells NPR's Renee Montagne.

The Getty Museum had one of the largest acquisition budgets in the country, and perhaps the world which was used in a very savvy way to help it:

build what today is considered one of the most important antiquities collections in the world," Felch says. But that collection would not be possible without the help of a complex web of grave robbers, patrons, wealthy collectors and the complicity of some of the world's most revered museums. "The illicit antiquities trade is kind of the dirtiest corner of the art market," Felch says. "It brought together highly educated, Ph.D. Harvard-graduate curators, and you saw them doing business in bank vaults with people who were in the criminal underground."It might seem an odd partnership, but the brightest minds in the museum world were driven to deal with criminals in the pursuit of objects of beauty. To account for their illicit dealings, Felch says, the Getty adopted a see-no-evil policy. "They danced this very tricky dance for several years, where they publicly denounced the illicit trade and they decried the looting that their acquisitions fueled," he explains.[...]

Collectors and dealers will no doubt be discomfited by the clear expression in this book of the notion that it is the market that is the motor for illicit dealings in artefacts. The book also has a message concerning the customary "good home" argument applied by public museums and private collectors:

The "high" road often taken by antiquities curators — that they are nobly saving what would be otherwise lost pieces — is the core irony at the center of Chasing Aphrodite, Felch says. "The Getty and other American museums over the last decades have justified the acquisition of these things under questionable circumstances by saying that these poor orphan objects have been separated from their archaeological context already, and that we have a duty to rescue them from the market and to preserve them and display them publicly," he says. But the truth was that by buying these objects on the black market, these museums were further fueling the looting that was going on across the Mediterranean.

It is of course worth noting that the museums claim to be rescuing iteems from 'the market' where they could end up in private collections, and private collectors claim to be rescuing objects from ending up in "museum storerooms" where they would not be cared-for or exhibited.

Certainly I think this book will have a great deal to add to the ongoing debate on artefact collecting and in particular expose the hypocrisy of US antiquity dealers' attempts to whitewash the image of the international antiquities trade and its relationship to the looting of archaeological sites.

Chasing Aphrodite
By Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Hardcover, 384 pages
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
List Price: $28

The cover photo shows an ancient Greek depiction of the monstrosity of artefact collecting (right) and trade (left) descending on the fragile and defenceless archaeological record, dismembering it before our very eyes as society stands by helplessly. To save the victim, we need not only to sever the heads of these monsters by legal action, but remove the ground from under their feet by removing public support for their attack on the archaeological record.

Eisenhower on American Greatness and Art Acquisition

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Dwight D. Eisenhower, 2nd April 1946, speaking in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when he was awarded a life fellowship of the museum:

"The freedom enjoyed by this country from the desolation that has swept over so many others during the past years gives to America greater opportunity than ever before to become the greatest of the world's repositories of art".

An opportunity dealers and collectors over there in subsequent decades took advantage of - thus creating huge desolation of archaeological sites and monuments, not stopping at items stolen from museum stores. This serves as a shameful monument to the undiscriminating greed of contemporary collectors of decontextualised artefacts and those involved in their commerce. Meanwhile their lawyers argue that what few laws the US has instituted to regulate their satisfying of greed were intended as a "compromise" to benefit and uphold that market. They argue that they should not be being applied in the way they are, arguing a free-for-all where American collectors get what they want is somehow the best way to "preserve" decontexualised artefacts. It does not however do anything to help preserve the places from where those artefacts are plundered to fuel that exploitive free-for-all no-questions-asked market.

And other countries have to just get used to the idea that Chicago Ron and others of his ilk can commercially loot the archaeological sites away to their heart's content and scurry off with the loot for "passionate" US collectors to shut away in ever-growing private artefact collections the other side of the Ocean without raising a peep of protest. How dare they oppose the US collector's "rights", eh?

Photo: Eisenhower looking at evacuated art in Europe.

April Fool from CPRI

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It seems to me that the Santa Fe-based "Cultural Property Research Institute" (an antiquity dealers' advocacy group masquerading as an inefficient "research institute") has got its dates wrong. A text they have released (State Department in Contravention of the Law?) can only be seen as an April Fool joke accidentally published two days early. Still, I suppose that's better than all those promised pieces of "research" which are months overdue.

Among the gems of deadpan humour contained in this obviously satirical text, the reader will spot the following:

- "has disregarded the criteria established by the law that created it", the enquiring reader will ask what might they be, and in what way do they benefit the world's cultural heritage?

- "the Act was intended not just to save objects, but to save context and heritage". Where does it say that? Where? It actually says nothing of the kind in the CCPIA (which in general it has to be admitted is a badly-written text, but that is no excuse for the CPRI making things up).

- "limitations placed by the Act on the ability of the US Government to enter into agreements with other countries to impose import restrictions", eh? This is in an act intended to IMPLEMENT the 1970 UNESCO Convention on what? Oh yes, "on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property", so why did the US government issue an "implementing" act limiting its own ability to actually "implement" the actual measures of the Convention? Why would the US government fail to enter into an agreement with another country who requests it to actually implement the measures implicit in becoming a state party to the Convention? That's just plain daft, but then all of this US pretence to be implementing the Convention is plain double daft. Let the US just end the farce and withdraw from the Convention they have for nearly three decades obviously had no intention of fully honouring. Let the existing Wild West ethos of much of the US antiquity market show itself for what it is.

- "a provision requiring U.S. restrictions to be part of a "concerted international response" had been violated" eh? So where actually is this mythical "provision"? Where? How can you "violate" a provision that is not there?

- "in a manner that discriminated against Americans and that moved the trade abroad". Like keeping Chinese artefacts from being illegally exported FROM China? Isn't that what the 1970 Convention "on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property" supposed to do? What did the Americans think it was supposed to do when they became a state party? And how funny, an American law which affects Americans in America and not foreigners living outside America.

"Seminar summary at http://www.cprinst.org/Home/issues. Full transcript available soon". Can they manage it by April 1st?

The comedy is continued by that master of black humour, D.C. lawyer Peter Tompa, who asks "A related question is whether the State Department Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs is listening or whether Assistant Secretary Anne Stock and her staff remain tone deaf as ever". Listen to what? The inventive rantings of the lunatic fringe of the US no-questions-asked market in dugup antiquities? That is a real joke.

What on earth is New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand thinking of aligning herself with these people with their all-too-transparent antisocial aims? Maybe readers in the States might like to write to her office and ask her http://gillibrand.senate.gov/contact/.

Vignette: Hilary and lookalike Kirsten (left) show their appreciation of the 2011 CPIA April Fool joke at the expense of the skeletal US International Cultural Property Protection program, such as it is.

Chinese Collectors of Chinoiserie? How Terrible?

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In the Kirsten Gillibrand Seminar on the CCPIA organized by the CPRI the "problem" of China was raised. As we know due to a MOU between the USA and China, the import of certain types of dugup antiquities from China is restricted to those that can be documented as having been legally exported from there. But what is this? Shock horror:

As a result, the market in such materials has just been shifted elsewhere. China is a ridiculous case. We have closed our markets to ancient Chinese art when the biggest market for such material is in China itself. State has failed to administer the statute fairly. >[...] A[rthur] H[oughton] also asks how effective the CPIA can be if 90% of the archaeological material sold is done so in a source country like China.

In a country "like" China? Somehow I think our transatlantic friends have lost sight of what the "C" in CCPIA stands for. To remind them it is called the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property. So the fact that cultural property, dugup or otherwise (and 90% of it or not) is staying in China unless legally exported is what the Convention is aiming to achieve, isn't it? Why does that indicate that "State has failed to administer the statute fairly"? It certainly is fair to the Chinese people and Chinese collectors if it true that the antiquities are not now leaking out of the country in an uncontrolled and illegal manner to the world's largest no-questions-asked antiquities market in the USA and this is due to US dealers responsibly adhering to import restrictions which support that.

Vignette: Does the CPRI want to see Chinese artefacts kept away from Chinese collectors?

The Cultural Property Implementation Act: Is it Working?

The Cultural Policy Research Institute, transparently a dealers' lobbyist group masquerading as a rather ineffective research institution based in Santa Fe, is hosting a meeting today: The Cultural Property Implementation Act: Is it Working? at the Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, D.C. I suppose the answer depends on whether you regard it as a cop-out law (in which case its working very well) or something which was actually intended to implement the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (in which case it most certainly is not). Is the CCPIA in any way able to effectively stop the import of illegally obtained artefacts from the looting of the Cairo Museum and archaeological sites in Egypt this very moment? (No, the Egyptians would have to ask nicely, make a number of promises, wait for the CPAC to meet a couple of times beforte this could even be "implemented", by which time who knows what could have passed onto the US market?).

The usual culprits are speaking at the seminar alongside a few token assorted others, but they each seem to get ten minutes (within antiquity collectors' attention span I presume), so I guess it will not be a very intellectually challenging meeting. No doubt we will be getting a blow-by-blow account from the observing Mr Tompa in due course. Hooray. If US dealers and collectors had any decency they'd be recommending that the US stop pretending to implement the Convention and withdraw from it and rename the CCPIA the 'United States Antiquities Market Protection Act'. But then if the majority had any real decency, the global antiquities market would not look like it does today anyway and America would not need a Reagan-era cop-out act.

Antiquity Looted by US Military from Saddam Palace on Sale in US

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"Product (sic) 54/64": Shang Dynasty Sword: 4,000 Year old Bronze Shang Dynasty Sword Acquired by U.S. Military during a tour of Iraq from one of Saddam Hussein's Palaces. Museum Piece and Gallery 63 has it!"

What does it mean "acquired by U.S. Military during a tour of Iraq "? You mean pure and simple looted by U.S. Military. A museum piece - looted by US soldiers from an Iraqi museum. Well, as Donald Rumsfeld famously said "stuff happens" in a US led invasion of a sovereign country. Auction is on Sun, Feb 13th @ 11am.

Hat-tip Ton Cremers MSN

Bush on Antiquity Looting in Iraq

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Larry Rothfield (author of 'The Rape of Mesopotamia', 2009 - ISBN: 9780226729459) has an interesting post on his 'Punching Bag' blog. In it he takes a good hard look at G.W. Bush's own account in his autobiography "Decision Points" of his "surprise" at the looting in Iraq associated with the US-led invasion ('Bush's ghostwriters on the looting of the Iraq National Museum'). Bush skims over the topic.
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