Looking After the Past "the American Way"

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Washington lawyer Tompa has another smug post on his blog this morning on the topic of how we should all be jolly grateful to US collectors who buy illegally exported archaeological artefacts from foreign lands to proudly "display, conserve and publish" (ha, ha), while "the Italians" cannot look after their own ancient buildings at home. The evidence for this is that we read in the papers, bits of the ruins of two ancient old buildings fell off after they'd been in the open sky for two thousand years, as old ruins tend to do - that is why they are ruins, after all. I am sure Mr Tompa, erudite admirer of classical culture, has seen loads of Piranesi engravings for example. Its the fact that bits dropped off these buildings which facilitated the bringing of architectural elements home from the Grand Tour which started the collecting craze, and when all the loose bits had been picked up, the dismantling began, the destruction of sites by looters for collectables that is the problem today.

Collectors in the States with such loudly expressed smugly disapproving attitudes to the problems faced by some countries rich in the remains of the past might pause for thought and see how the boot fits on the other foot.

The US and Canada of course have very few standing buildings, ruins or otherwise, more than two hundred or so years old that it has to look after. There is that colonial barn however for which no money can be found to look after and the museum is having to organize artefact hunting rallies out there. How many more buildings of the colonial period have been simply swept away or fallen down in the US? In Philadephia for example? Then we recall that (just down the road from Tompa's office) President Truman, no less, had to move out of the White House because it was threatening collapse, the historic monument (finished in just 1800) was virtually rebuilt in 1949-52 at a cost (then) of $5,800,000. That is the equivalent of 47 750 000 today. But then that is not conservation, the building was simply gutted and most of the original historic fabric was sacrificed (I wonder how many private collectors have bits of its brick or rotted timber "tastefully framed" on the wall in their living rooms, or bits being passed round US classrooms as "history in your hands"?).

So I suppose if the US had a Colosseum, it might be able to afford a minimum of 48 million dollars on the repair of this single structure (much bigger of course than the White House) every few decades or so. I suppose if it had a Domus Aurea it could find another 48 million for its upkeep every few decades or so, if it had a couple of Gothic cathedrals scattered in a few of the major cities, each could raise 48 million dollars for their upkeep. What about an entire city buried under volcanic ash in the Utah desert in AD 79? How much cash would the US administration pump into that each year or raise from developing it as a tourist destination? Or like the White House would they just gut it and rebuild it in concrete with fibreglass beams and install revenue-making attractions, like a hamburger bar in a thermopolium on the route from the ticket office to the rollercoaster rides in the forum? What about the Medieval and Renaissance buildings of the ancient city in a lagoon in the Gulf of Mexico just off Florida, full of artworks but threatened by the rising sea levels? How much money would the US government and corporate sponsorship raise for securing it and strengthening the foundations?

How much money is available from the state budget for the conservation of the many pueblo ruins which cover just a small part of the area of the USA? How many BLM staff are assigned to look after those sites? What would their state of preservation at that rate of expenditure be if, instead of being where they are, they were exposed to the rains and frosts of a more temperate climate like the buildings of Europe? What if instead of being in the middle of a desert they were actually in the centres of busy towns with traffic vibrations pigeon droppings, vagrants and all the other problems town centre monuments can have if not properly managed? But proper management costs money.

What if the entire surface of the United States of America from Florida to Seattle, Texas to Maine was covered in ruins on state-owned or local authority-owned land and private property some going back two thousand years or more, every few tens of kilometres, how does Mr Tompa think they'd look today? Would the US really be spending billions of dollars on them annually instead of spending the money on tanks and guns border controls and finding Bin Laden? How could the US develop a way of making these thousands of sites pay their way, by making them all, thousands of individual sites and monuments (every surviving colonial period barn in Connecticut for example, or every ghost town in the west), into tourist attractions?

Instead of this self-centred "I'm all right jack" smugness from US collectors, let's have a little awareness from self-styled "cultural property observers" of the problems of other people. In particular, I'd draw atention to the fact that fighting the looting caused by the illegal antiquities market is a drain on the scarce resources available for looking after sites and monuments in every country (as it would be in the US if the US had more of them). This is totally unnecessary and the resources which go on this could be reapportioned if dealers and collectors like those Peter Tompa defends in his work for the ACCG would themselves take active steps to exclude illegally obtained material from their market. That they do not do even contemplate doing this tells us a lot about the sort of people Peter Tompa is attempting to defend by his smug narrow-minded nitpicking.

Photo: White House, the historic fabric swept away leaving just a facade, a simulacrum of the original building.

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