Archaeology, Cultural Heritage, and the Antiquities Trade

Introduction

Introduction Neil Brodie There is a booming international trade in antiquities of all kinds, and from all countries of the world. Many of these antiquities are removed destructively from archaeological sites, monuments, or cultural institutions, illegally exported from their countries of origin, and converted into legal commodities through a series of commercial transactions and exchanges across jurisdictions. The conversion is facilitated by different stolen property laws and limitation periods and ensured through forged documentation and corrupt officials. Most antiquities are bought and sold without a documented find spot (provenience) or ownership history (provenance); trading histories thus become so complicated and so obscure that it is almost impossible to identify definitively any antiquities that have been stolen or illegally exported. By the time these “unprovenanced” antiquities enter the salesrooms and museums of Europe and North America, where they command veneration and high prices, the destructive and illegal circumstances of their initial acquisition have been long forgotten. But although the trade in antiquities flouts national and international laws, it does not end there. Unscientific digging aimed at recovering salable antiquities extirpates the stratigraphies and contexts of archaeological sites, destroying archaeological information and, ultimately, historical knowledge. When these antiquities are redeployed in public or private collections as “art,” shorn of their contextual relations, they are then forced to conform to Western conceptions of artistic production and consumption, with all the ideological and political baggage that such conceptions entail. For many archaeologists, working in an intellectual tradition that acknowledges at least some degree of objectivity about the past, this uncritical insertion of ancient products into modern cultural frames is anathema. But archaeologists are not alone. Many anthropologists and art historians take a similarly jaundiced view of the type of cultural appropriation and revaluation that marks the antiquities trade, which some claim is implicated globally in maintaining “Western” structures of political dominance. Some of the issues raised by the antiquities trade were discussed in June 2003 at two sessions convened at the Fifth World Archaeological Congress (WAC) in Washington, D.C. One session was organized by Christina Luke and Morag Kersel, the other by Neil Brodie and Kathryn Walker Tubb. Most of the contributions to this book are expanded versions of papers first presented there, although chapters 4 and 10 were specially commissioned, and chapter 1 was first  / Neil Brodie presented in February 2004 at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Hague Convention. Archaeological Heritage: A Threatened Resource? The damage caused “on the ground” to archaeological sites and monuments by unrecorded and unsystematic excavation is well documented by a large number of studies that have utilized archival and literature research, field survey, photographic testimony, and informant interviews (see, for example, Atwood 2004; Brodie et al. 2000; Coggins 1969; Gill and Chippindale 1993; Graepler 1993; Gutchen 1983; Lafont 2004; Meyer 1973; O’Keefe 1997; Paredes 1998; Renfrew 2000; Schick 1998; Stead 1998; Toner 2002; and papers in Brodie et al. 2001; Brodie and Tubb 2002; Heilmeyer and Eule 2004; Leyten 1995; Messenger 1999; Schmidt and McIntosh 1996; Tubb 1995; Vitelli 1996). More evidence is provided here in chapter 8, in which Christopher Roosevelt and Christina Luke describe a survey of burial tumuli in the Güre-Uşak region of western Turkey where the Lydian Hoard was discovered, famous—or infamous—because of its acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1960s and subsequent return to Turkey in 1993 (Brodie et al. 2000: 8–10; Kaye and Main 1995). Roosevelt and Luke make the important point that although the destruction caused by looting is clear on the ground—in the form of ransacked tombs—it is hard to assess just what has been lost, in terms of both material and historical information. Nevertheless, despite the losses, there is still something to be learned from what is left: the spatial patterning of the tumuli themselves throws light on the political geography of Lydia during the Lydian and Persian periods of the seventh through fourth centuries B.C. In similar vein, Luke and John Henderson provide an account in chapter 7 of the damage caused to the archaeological heritage of the Lower Ulúa Valley of northwest Honduras by looting to feed a thriving market for Maya material. ThepointmadebyRooseveltandLukethatnoestimateispossibleofmaterial lost from a looted site, or of what the accumulated material losses mean in terms of wasted information, is an important one. All that remains is an unknowable number of lacunae in the historical evidence, each one of indeterminate size and...