Debating Barriers of Bubbles

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We have all seen the unseemly fracas as dealers in one or another type of dugup artefact imported in bulk into the US are trying desperately not to get them written on a piece of paper. Maybe they will, maybe they will not, it is all in the hands of the State Department and whether the US can be bothered to help stem the global haemorrhage of clandestinely dugup collectables onto the international market, in which today the US is a major player.

Watching this spectacle we should not ignore the basic fact that what is being discussed in the US is how to make a barrier of bubbles. As I said here last month:

We have all read the The Medici Conspiracy, followed the later developments and then the sorry spectacle of humiliated US museums sending stuff back to Italy. Then there was the Sisto case last year. Yes, the US takes the moral highground and gives a lot of stuff back. Hip hip hooray…. But let us note one important fact omitted in all the jubilant press releases how wonderful the US is being. Every single one of those objects (and probably much else not detected yet) passed through US customs INTO the US without a hitch.

whether or not an MOU with Italy is extended is really a matter of putting in place a "feelgood" law. The US can point to it and say "see, we are doing something".

If the truth were told the effectiveness of any MOU is only as good as the vigilance of the US customs officers at the point of entry. If they are looking the other way when archaeological artefacts pass through, then an MOU does not make much of a difference. In fact, when the ACCG's Baltimore illegal Coin Import coins were stopped at Baltimore airport, it was (the ACCG admitted) because their representatives went along to the airport to tell customs that they should stop that package. Otherwise, it appears, they were afraid that the package could have gone through unchallenged and the ACCG would have to get some more coins sent to the US without the papers making them legal to try to force their case.

Whether or not the Italy MOU is extended, metal detectorists, pot-diggers and tomb-robbers destructively mining archaeological sites for saleable ancient collectables in adjacent Provence, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Albania, and heavily looted Bulgaria (not to mention across the sea Tunesia, Algeria, Libya) can quite freely pop anything they like into a package to the US. Even if it is stopped, the US has no MOU with these countrties and has no obligation to enforce their export laws once the objects are on US soil. As any US dealers importing illegally exported archaeological finds in some quantities from such countries will know and would be counting on. Those small businesses openly selling items looted from sites in Bulgaria by the kilogramme like potatoes or individually included.

The US signed the UNESCO Convention, but the CPIA makes it clear that they did not do so with any intention to actually make it mean something. It was largely for show. After all the US really has very little in the way of ancient cultural material that collectors overseas are desperate to get their hands on as part of "their" ("internationalist") heritage. There is not a huge market for Native American pots and Anasazi menstrual pads over here in Europe, not comparable to that in dugup Roman coins and Greek vases over there. Probably the US ruling elite is not actually too interested in stopping "native stuff" being exported anyway, it is not after all "their" cultural heritage. The US therefore has no real interest in mutual enforcement of import-export regulations for cultural property with foreign countries unless it has some propaganda or political role to play in US forfeign affairs.

All this ignores the fact that - signatory of the UNESCO Convention or not - there should in any case be no need for MOUs, the states party should be requiring imported cultural property from ALL countries to have valid export licences from the country of origin of the shipment. Otherwise they are just states fostering cowboy businesses trading in illicitly obtained items.


The fundamental problem is that, as a means to deal with the trade in illicitly-obtained archaeological artefacts, the 1970 Conventiont is already out of date. It was written to address the problems of another antiquities market within the general "art market". In this earlier manifestation, the archaeological items moving across borders were big and going to relatively limited numbers of major collectors and museums. At the time this convention was being written, however, metal detectors were already in the process of changing the nature of antiquities collecting, both what was being collected and in what quantities. The market is no longer just in "works of art" but any old broken bric-a-brac dug up on ancient sites. The collecting of artefacts became "democratised" (sic) by the lowering of prices as the threshold of what was collectable was lowered drastically by the availability of metal (in particular) "partifacts" in bulk. This was not taken into account by the Convention. Two decades later, the Internet produced another revolution in the way these items could be bought and sold, no longer through bricks and moratar shops which could be registered and their records examined (Art. 10a). This too is not taken into account in the Convention. The UNESCO Convention with its Article 7 is a fossil of the nineteenth century trade. The way that it is "implemented" in the US is designed to keep the US antiquities trade firmly in the Petrarchian/ nineteenth century no-questions-asked mould which suits both collectors and dealers fine. But does nothing to stop the looting.

It is odd to think that an analogy might be equally lively discussions today on the implementation of an international convention on international currency exchange or personal data storage and dissemination both written in 1970 when these things were done on paper which was not replaced by one which took into account that digital means of information storage and transfer (the Internet) have revolutionised these fields too. The current form of the ACCG and coin dealer Sayles and Lavendar would be impossible without the internet, let's have a convention about archaological artefacts to fit the times. Rather than debating how a forty year old fossil Convention should be "implemented" we need to be discussing how we should have a Convention which applies to the realities of the antiquities (or if you like "art") market of the 2010s and not the 1960s and 1970s.


Vignette: Current US customs controls as substantial a threat to illicit antiquities smuggling as a barrier of bubbles.
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