LA Times Lapse: US 'Study' Published a Week too Late... Joke Spoilt?

This one takes the biscuit. One explanation I suppose might be that the author of the article discussed here submitted it for last week's April 1st edition, but it got put in the wrong editorial drawer. Certainly it may be observed that some Americans clearly have a problem writing about cultural property in a way that makes sense to a reader from Europe, many of them really just  don't get it.  In addition, there is another problem for people writing about complex rocket-science-like things like protecting the heritage if their training is legal rather than anything else. A number of US lawyers don't get it either- some of them embarrassingly so. So Adam Wallwork, Student at NYU School of Law,  is right out of his depth here:  'The archaeology paradox: more laws, less treasure', La-la Times, April 7, 2014.

It's no great surprise that an American pro-collecting author is trying to argue "Tight restrictions on export and ownership of artifacts is leaving the world a poorer place [culturally]", it's their usual blinkered and self-centred moaning about being victimised by people with more classical cultural property on their territory than they have. Nothing new there, then, moan, moan, moan. But the real novelty is the argument he uses to bolster the moaning. That takes the discussion to an entirely new stage of transatlantic antiquitist idiocy. Peter Tompa cluelessly (see above) thinks it's fantastic though ('Do More Restrictions Equate with Fewer Archaeological Discoveries?' Monday, April 7, 2014). Just take a look and weep:

In country after country, empirical data show that when rigid cultural property laws are put in place, major archaeological excavations and discoveries slow markedly, making source countries — and the world at large — culturally poorer. I surveyed 90 countries with one or more archaeological sites on UNESCO's World Heritage Site list, and my study shows that in most cases the number of discovered sites diminishes sharply after a country passes a cultural property law. There are 222 archaeological sites listed for those 90 countries. When you look into the history of the sites, you see that all but 21 were discovered before the passage of cultural property laws. On average in art-rich countries, discoveries that landed on UNESCO's list diminished by 90% after these laws were passed. To illustrate: Italy has seven archaeological sites on the World Heritage list; five were discovered before its 1909 cultural property law, but only two after.  [...] In 2003, the Chinese government switched course, dropping its cultural property law and embracing collaborative international archaeological research. Since then, China has nominated 11 archaeological sites for inclusion in the World Heritage Site list, including eight in 2013, the most ever for China.

You just could not make this stuff up. Basically this person seems not to understand what an archaeological site is, nor what a World Heritage Site is, or what they are for (and indeed who selects them and how). It obviously never crossed this person's mind that instead of the World Heritage List, he should be testing his Disney-bred model on the data from national Sites and Monuments Records/HERs. Take the UK for example, where regulations on the export of archaeological cultural property were established with the establishment of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest in 1952. Anyone with any familiarity with these records (and they ARE available online) will see at once the fallacy of Wallwork's interpretation of - what actually are quite obviously the wrong data.

The same goes for Poland, where the number of sites discovered and documented comes from the systematic fieldwork (AZP) conducted within the new antiquities regulations of 1968 onwards. The  WHL sites where archaeological excavations have taken place for the most part never been 'lost'.

It gets worse though. This author considers that the effects he claims to have observed are due to the stifling effect the legislation has on overseas expeditions to 'source countries', where obviously he thinks the ignorant brown skinned folk who live there cannot manage to do anything by themselves without American help. He is straying dangerously into Neocolonialist waters:

the downside may be that they reduce incentives for foreign governments, nongovernmental organizations and educational institutions to invest in overseas exploration because their efforts will not necessarily be rewarded by opportunities to hold, display and study what is uncovered. To the extent that source countries can fund their own archaeological projects, artifacts and sites may still be discovered. But the drop in World Heritage Site discoveries after passage of cultural property laws suggests that external sources aren't as active as they were and domestic funding isn't offsetting the loss. 

So the Americans discovered Stonehenge for the UK, Biskupin for the Poles and Carnac for the French. Nice.

I must admit I missed his article: 'The Economics of Cultural Patrimony Law' in the prestigious 2013 edition of the Indonesian Journal of International and Comparative Law. Somehow though I do not think I'll be in a hurry to get it through Interlibray loan...

UPDATE 7th April 2014,
I now see that Donna Yates and Teressa Davis have spotted an online version of the original article, it seems to dash any hopes that my original goodwill interpretation that this was an April Fool joke gone wrong was unfounded. Gruesome.