Monday 29 October 2012

Photographs of the Commercial Looting of the Temple Facade at Placeres, Mexico

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The Trafficking Culture website has just published over forty photos (made available by archaeologist David Freidel) of the removal by commercial artefact hunters in the 1960s/1970s of pieces of the stucco temple facade at the Classic Maya site of Placeres in the jungle regions of Campeche, Mexico. This is of course not a portable antyiquity, but the entire side of a monument. Neverthelss it was "portableised" in order that it could surface on the US market. This obviously was a well-planned commercial operation on a large scale, not the work of casual peasnt 'subsistence diggers'.

The monument's pieces were then taken to the US where they were in the posession of dealer Everett Rassinga who attempted to get the Metropolitan Museum of Art to exhibit these "antiquities" (good for sales - to their credit they refused). The fragments were eventually returned to Mexico, where they are now in the  Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City (as detailed in the Glasgow Project's Encyclopedia entry on the Placeres facade - the fate of other aretfacts from the site is not discussed).  No arrests are reported as having been made.

Donna Yates of the project is looking for more photographs or information about the movement of objects of this type - the information will be kept confidential unless you approve its release. Another member of the team is also after looting photos (see here). Meanwhile this seems a good opportunity to promote again the "looting" blog of Margaret Brown Vega and Nathan Craig

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