An archivist's take on the antiquities market

There is an interesting blog post here where Richard Cox (Professor in Library and Information Science at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Information Sciences) looks at the issues surrounding the antiquities trade from the point of view of his own specialisation. This is entirely appropriate since of course the archaeological rcord is an archive of knowledge about the past, and it is interesting to learn how an archivist sees what is happening to it.

Some of the difficulties in the antiquities trade concern the unavailability of records that ought to document the provenance of the acquisition of the colected artifacts. The archivist picks out a quote from Waxman's recent book ("Loot...") where she writes (p. 220), “

There is no simple way to track the source of these acquisitions or tally their provenances, no database for the public to consult. In the age of computers, this seems a strange lapse of information and one that denies the public the benefit of transparency”

She is talking about museums, but this could equally applied to bits of the common heritage "curated" in scattered personal collections. Why are there so few archives of the movement of archaeological artefacts between those "old" collections the archivist seems to wonder. I wonder too (though I suspect I know the real reason).

On a slightly different tack, I was interested in another comment he drew attention to - in this case on forgery, but I wonder how much this can also be applied to the creation of personal collections of contextless archaeological artefacts:

The forger or forgers had more personal motives than national pride or blind faith. Greed was part of it, surely, but something else was at work too. Human life is finite, while history is, if not eternal, relatively so. To create bits of the ancient past is to become, perhaps, something more than mortal. For some of those who can, it might be impossible to resist the temptation to sneak a tiny yet indelible fingerprint onto the vast canvas of yesteryear, and forge a personal link with an ancient temple priest or pharaoh, before our short time on earth comes to an end.

(Quoted from Nina Burleigh (2008), Unholy Business: A True Tale of Faith, Greed, and Forgery in the Holy Land, New York, p. 256). It set me thinking whether the very fact of the loss of context is not a more important factor in what collectors of portable antiquities are up to than we have tended to think. The collector by snatching them from being archaeological evidence is making "an indelible fingerprint on the vast canvas of yesteryear", their collection is their very own fingerprint made of immortal elements of the past, personalised by being devoid of its original context, freed of the need to base conclusions on the application of a methodology on observations of context of discovery, deposition and use, when narrative and speculative imagination has free rein.