Closed to Debate in Bangor

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I was talking about British archaeologists who support collectors and collecting the other day. In the Moneta-L message discussed in the post above this, ACCG employee John Hooker has obligingly supplied another example, this time from Wales. Interestingly he does so in the context of pontificating on the alleged "bad judgement" of "people with established reputations" to engage in the debate on the archaeological heritage and the illicit trade in antiquities. He warns, "This can result in a rapid loss of hard-earned reputation". As an example he appends a name-dropping anecdote:

I once directed Prof. Raimund Karl to one of Paul Barford's blog entries. Ray was shocked, as he had communicated with Paul Barford years ago. Ray is not only a long-time correspondent of mine but is an archaeologist specialist in both Iron Age and heritage matters and is the "head of school" at his university. He has an impressive CV for his positions in Austria, Germany and Wales. I cannot say what he said, but he had provided me with the quotable:

"There certainly are some fundamentalist archaeologists, too, who condemn any trading of antiquities regardless of the specific circumstances of the individual case, but those can reasonably safely be ignored."

He said that he already has said the same (in German) on television.

Well Karl lists as one of his research interests "heritage management" though does not reveal on his webpage whether he collects any antiquities or coins.

Professor Karl might find it interesting to pay more attention to the heritage debate in his adopted country. If he did, he would find that it is not exclusive, it does not "ignore" people whose views do not fit into the mainstream, but there is a much more open engagement. This is what English Heritage Conservation Policy Sustainable Management of the Historic Environment (online here) establishes . I am sure prof Karl will be well familiar with its content and implications (I am sorry I have not seen the corresponding document for Wales, it probably says much the same).

I am not sure how many of those "fundamentalist archaeologists" who "condemn any trading of antiquities" whatsoever there really are in the United Kingdom. It seems that such a position would be more prevalent in US circles (but again not as a general rule, even in AIA circles). I know of a few examples, two British (that post invited collectors to list others, such a list never materialised) and it seems to me that there can be very few others. This is even if we accept that for some reason they are afraid to raise their voice in criticism of the laissez faire policies represented by the PAS in Bloomsbury, partnering English and Welsh (for the moment) antiquity collectors.

Certainly I would not agree with them. In order for there to be an "illicit" market in antiquities, it means there is a licit one. I cannot see why any archaeologists ("fundamentalists" or not) would argue against the sale of Grand Tour antiquities like that sarcophagus side from the Adams interior at Lansdowne House discussed in the press a while ago. It was discovered, hoiked out and cut up long ago, and it has been well-documented by those who curated it and there is no question about the ethics involved in its acquisition (there were no ethical guidelines or such qualms in the Grand Tour years). No harm, either real or potential, is being done to the archaeological record by the sale of objects such as this with such well-documented collecting histories. This is licit antiquity (or as some would have it "ancient art" collecting) and I see nothing wrong with it. The only thing that for me is vaguely controversial is that one might perhaps question whether public funds should not be raised so that something like this would not be shut away in a private collection but a public one - but by purchase and not coercion, but in fact I see nothing wrong with an item with such a documented pedigree of private ownership remaining as such another generation or so. We might also debate whether the heritage is enhanced or depreciated by the fact that this object has now left the interior and setting of Lansdowne House, though of course there is nothing anyone can do about that if it is a result of the owners falling on hard times in the past, one may regret - as I am sure they do - that they had to sell it, but cannot criticise them for it.

It is not just Grand Tour artefacts that are on the market licitly. It has come to be accepted in most circles that the date 1970 (the first accessions to the UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property) is a valid nominal cut-off point for licitness of antiquities. Anything documentable as having "surfaced" on the market before then can be treated for most purposes as if it were kosher - whether or not its acquisition in fact was. That seems reasonable to me (even though in fact there were earlier international documents highlighting the damaging effects of the illicit trade and clandestine artefact hunting on archaeological sites, and the 1970 Convention is far from a perfect tool).

I suspect that it is not so much "fundamentalist archaeologists" who are against the free circulation of artefacts which "surfaced" pre-1970 (leaving aside the rather extreme position of Zahi Hawass in Egypt).* If you look more carefully at the debates on "repatriation", while they may be supported by archaeologists, to a great degree the campaigns are being conducted by people from other areas of public life and for several different purposes. This is why I do not consider so-called "repatriation issues" to be an integral part of the set of problems which I discuss on this blog. The inclusion of this body of separate issues in the portable antiquity collecting debate confuses the issue. While there may be to an extent (a small, I would say, one) some justice in what people like Cuno say about these issues when seen in the context of "pre-1970 repatriation" debates, I see no absolutely grounds for applying them wholesale to the ongoing commerce in and collection (either private or public) of items more recently "surfaced" (from underground). Mixing the two only allows the "collectors' rights" (sic) lobbyists to confuse the public. (And I think they are doing this deliberately and dishonestly.)

I personally think that "pre-1970 repatriation" issues are only marginally related to the issue of the expanding international no-questions-asked antiquities market and artefact hunting and collecting. I am certainly against "fundamentalist" calls to "send it all back" in general, though think the issue should be openly discussed on a case by case basis.

I certainly do not agree with Raimund Karl's reported position that the views of any "fundamentalist archaeologists" about antiquity collecting and commerce should be simply "ignored". I think we (especially other archaeologists and heritage professionals) should encourage them to participate in the wider debate as it is only through an exchange of views that the core issues can be isolated and dealt with. Another archaeologist supportive of collecting, Gabriel Moshenska of UCL has pointed out in a recent forum discussion that the "metal detecting debate" is as much about splits within the archaeological community about what is important and what is not. One may disagree (as I do) about what he considers in that paper as "staggeringly unimportant", but that is where debate begins - not with simply dismissing an opposing view as something that "can reasonably safely be ignored". Let us see some more archaeologists in the UK taking the 'artefact hunting and preservation debate' bull by the horns and facing the issues instead of just running from them.


* It would be interesting to count how many archaeologists were at the Cairo Conference last year

Korea Looks at Repatriation Issues

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From The Korea Herald: "In November the French and the Japanese governments announced they would return the Joseon-period royal books on court rites and ceremonies that had been taken by force from Korea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The announcements mark the end of years of negotiations between governments and relentless efforts by activists to have the priceless artifacts repatriated.

To mark this significant milestone, The Korea Herald [has presented] a four-part series on the return of “Uigwe,” the royal books on rites and ceremonies". The four parts are not interlinked, so here is a list of them.


1. Kim Yoon-mi, A step toward restoring Korea’s lost legacy The Korea Herald, 6th December 2010.

2. Kim Yoon-mi, The long journey: repatriating ‘Uigwe’, The Korea Herald, 7th December 2010.

3. Park Min-young, Home countries of relics join forces The Korea Herald, 8th December 2010.

4. Claire Lee, Artifacts to come home ― but to where? The Korea Herald, 9th December 2010.

"Britain's Scattered Heritage"

I come from a tiny little green island on the very edge of Europe, which due to a series of historical accidents [and actually against the odds] for a large part of recent history became very powerful (creating an "Empire on which the sun never sets") and then gave independence to that nation over the other side of the Atlantic that now aspires to that mantle.

In that role Britain was one of the few states that in the past four or five centuries has grabbed an awful lot of "cultural stuff" from other nations by conquest, economic dominance and other mechanisms (and now the US is doing the same). Today many of these victim nations "want our cultural property back please". In response the cultural property grabbing states like Britain refuse and then make up some high-faluting stuff about "cultural cosmopolitanism/internationalism" which is in some way superior to ill-defined "cultural nationalism" lying behind the request to be treated as an equal. Then came the Declaration of Universal (Encyclopedic) Museums and Cuno. All just different ways of saying "no, you inferior foreigners, shut up and go away and let us continue to enjoy your art and culture in our collections".

All this is very much to the taste of the no-questions-asked dealers and private collectors of portable antiquities, they too want to walk all over the rights of the people of the "source countries" to any of the archaeological (in particular) heritage of the land they inhabit. I have always felt however that including the broader "repatriation" issue in the debate on the current no-questions-asked trade in antiquities (which is the main subject of my blogging) is confusing the issue, and I believe this is done deliberatly by the dealers' lobby. For this reason, I have not dwelt on it much here on this blog, seeing it as a largely separate issue.

In one of the debates with Cuno last year (I think), a speaker asked how we would feel if it was our cultural property that had been taken "by the Chinese", would we still be spouting off about "universal museums" and a nation's manifest destiny to take everybody else's cultural stuff as trophies. This blog is an adaptation of that thought.

As I say Britain owes its former and current position (and survival of its own cultural heritage more or less intact) to a series of historical accidents. Britain came close to a Napoleonic invasion, arguably it would have only needed a few things go against Britain at the same time as a naval commander to woke up with a migrane on the morning of the Battle of Finistere for example and Britain to lose the air battle with Hitler to have had two invasions take place, with consequent serious losses of cultural property (and of course much else).

So in a new blog I activated today (I've been collecting the ideas and stuff for several weeks now) I decided to take a few significant pieces of our cultural property and imagine how in an alternative historical framework, they could have ended up in different places. Not all of the examples are entirely fictional. I had to use a bit of invention, I did not want to make the French, Americans and Nazis the only villans. I tried to make the discussed cases reflect the various types of problems involved, the Parthenon Marbles are (sort of) parallelled, the problem with repatriation of human remains is touched upon. I have not yet written the one on metal detectorists, but that will be going up in the next few days. I should admit that I do not intend maintaining it as a blog to which new material is constantly added, that is just the form I gave it when I set it up, it seemed less complicated than setting up a website.

The blog can be found here: http://scatteredheritage.blogspot.com/

Is there anything else I should have covered?

Cairo Conference Ends

The Cairo Conference “International Cooperation for the Protection and Repatriation of Cultural Heritage ” has now ended (Samer Al-Atrush, two days was not enough to establish everything that was apparently in the programme. The wish-list of artefacts to be returned was not as extensive as it might have been, "Egypt wants back six antiquities, including the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum and the Dendara Temple ceiling from the Louvre. Greece listed the Parthenon Marbles. Syria demanded five relics. Libya wants a statue of Apollo from the British Museum and a marble statue of a woman from the Louvre".

While the conference failed to arrive at an action plan, it produced lists from seven countries and will allow others to add to the tally over the next month after delegates report back to their governments. "I consider today a historic conference for all the world's countries that have lost artefacts", the archaeologist Zahi Hawass, who heads the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said. "We agreed to fight together. Cultural heritage has to return to its country. We are waiting for the other countries to present their wish list. Then we can go and fight. It doesn't mean that if you have a statue in the museum, you own the statue. No, it belongs to us".

But the conference, touted as the first of its kind, fell short of laying out a plan to retrieve the items.

Dr Hawass described international regulations on antiquities as "insufficient" but the conference did not call for an amendment to a United Nations convention on stolen antiquities that applies to thefts after 1970.

We will see what develops from this. Although there was no formal demand to amend the UNESCO Convention of 1970 concerning the protection and restitution of stolen artifacts which is, until now, not applicable to artifacts stolen before 1970. But Hawass told journalists: “We consider inviting representatives of UNESCO next year”.

This conference is the first of its kind and will be convened annully. Next year’s meeting is scheduled for April 2011 and will possibly be held in Greece. “We hope that we will be 60 countries next year,” Hawass concluded.

In the meanwhile it is interesting to note that assessments of how many nations were present differ greatly, some reports listed 21, others 22 and now we see reports of 25.

International Cooperation for the Protection and Repatriation of Cultural Heritage

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A lot of press attention has been received by the Cairo conference “International Cooperation for the Protection and Repatriation of Cultural Heritage ” being held at an administration building next to Cairo’s opera house, 7th-8th April. This concerns the trafficking of ancient artefacts as trophies and seeks to find ways of securing the return of these artefacts which are now in the museums and collections of Europe and the United States.

The main subject of the current spate of news stories is the determination of the delegates to present a united front on these issues. As Zahi Hawass, the convener of the session and rapidly becoming the figurehead of the cultural property trophy artefacts repatriation movement pointed out to his audience: “We need to co-operate, we need a unification between our countries. Every country is fighting alone; every country suffered alone, especially Egypt". “We will battle together ... "Maybe we will not succeed in a lifetime, [but] we have to open the subject".

The session will discuss strategies for recovering key works from foreign museums. One proposal was that the delegates should produce one list of artifacts that world opinion should demand return home. "We need to co-operate all of us especially with that wish list. we need all of us to come with one list and fight until [we get these] artefacts back”, Hawass is reported as saying. He emphasized that countries are not seeking to reclaim all antiquities, simply those taken illegally and artifacts of great historical value to the original country. The range of artefacts involved is quite wide, and many of them have already been widely discussed. Greece wants the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles; Mexico seeks the feathered headdress of Montezuma which is now in Vienna’s Museum of Ethnology; the Nigerians wants bronzes and other items from Benin back from the British Museum, Egypt wants the Rosetta Stone and bust of Nefertiti and a number of other ‘iconic’ items scattered in several European collections.

The conference stressed that even in cases where these objects had been legally acquired by standards of over a century ago, this is more of a question of goodwill, of surrendering cultural items held as hostages by formerly powerful nations as a symbol of power and domination. “Forget the legal issue,” Hawass is quoted as having said. “Important icons should be in their motherland, period”.
Another of the aims of the conference was to find ways of ensuring a more fuller implementation of the 1970 UNESCO convention under which countries agreed measures to prevent the illegal export of national treasures. Hawass pointed out that international rules and treaties are of little use in getting key relics back; several international conventions since 1954 have prohibited wartime looting, theft and resale of artifacts. These conventions do not however apply to items taken abroad before national laws or global agreements were in force. The conference delegates are expected to conclude that they should. It has been stated that a major initiative for the conference will therefore be to draft an appeal to amend the 1970 UNESCO Convention. In its current form, the Convention is not retroactive, but the delegates are reported to want it changed so that it applies to items acquired prior to that date. A united stand between affected nations would bolster the claims.

The continued looting that erodes the archaeological record of the unlucky “source countries” is also a source of concern. Apart from indiscriminate private collectors, “museums are the main source for stolen artifacts. If they stop (buying stolen artifacts) the theft will be less," Hawass told delegates. Nevertheless some advances have been made. Hawass also pointed out “we have good cooperation with other countries. We have had artifacts returned from Spain, Italy but the number one country that has returned artifacts is the United States". He discretely did not add that the US was probably the number one country which provides a market for stolen antiquities, with (according to ACCG figures) an estimated 50 000 collectors of ancient dug-up coins alone.

It seems to me that the programme of this conference is a trifle over-ambitious for such a short meeting. Defining a wish list of artefacts to be returned may sound easy, but to be effective it needs to be global in extent, and not exclude nations that were prevented from sending delegates for one reason or another (was Israel invited for example?). Also it is likely to mix objects which are not where delegates would want them to be for different reasons. Should the Benin Punitive Mission of 1897 be seen in the same terms as Lord Elgin's men about a century earlier sawing off bits of a ruined building to make portable pieces of art? It seems to me that two days for a presentation of the issues and debate on this one topic alone are scarcely enough if it is intended to produce by the end of the meeting a definitive list.

Secondly there is no way that (however much one might regret the way it is phrased) the 1970 UNESCO Convention can be amended to be retrospective. The very notion is simply naïve. At the very inkling of such a thing happening key market nations will withdraw and the whole shaky edifice of international co-operation on its basis will collapse. This is a pity because the UNESCO Convention is full of holes and we do need another better one. Nevertheless rendering it retrospective to include past “wrongs” really is not its function, neither is it practical (I think the 1970 cut-off date for legitimacy is already too much in the “historical past” of the antiquities). I also wonder to what extent it is really needed to regulate what must in the end be settled by compromise and gestures of goodwill between nations – and yes, naming and shaming and even a little gentle academic-political blackmail like the resolution of the Louvre stolen TT15 relief affair.

I am therefore unsure what the purpose of “uniting” would be and what form that could take. Perhaps the reports of the conference’s final conclusions tomorrow will give a better idea.


Marwa Awad, Egypt urges states to cooperate on artifact return, Reuters Television Apr 7, 2010.
Daniel Williams Egypt Leads Multinational Call to Bring Disputed Relics Home April 07, 2010
CBC News Teamwork needed to recover looted antiquities: Hawass , April 7, 2010
Unite to recover looted artefacts, Egypt forum told

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Vignette: "The British Museum Looter of Africa"photomontage.

Countries Discuss Recovering Antiquities

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Antiquities officials from around the world are gathering in Cairo today a two-day conference hosted by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). The aim of the forum is to discuss "the protection and restitution of cultural heritage", and will primarily be concerned with mapping out a strategy to recover ancient artefacts which have been pillaged from their countries and displayed as trophies abroad.* Delegates will also draw up lists of artefacts missing from their countries and displayed in museums abroad, treasures they have been demanding be returned, the SCA said.

The conference may also call on the United Nations cultural body UNESCO to amend the Convention on the "means of prohibiting and preventing the illicit import, export and transfer of ownership of cultural property" to take account of developments in the field that have appeared since it was drafted in the 1960s.

The delegates are antiquities officials, deputy culture ministers and museum directors from 21 countries that have seen some of their national heritage stolen over the centuries. The countries represented are from the Americas - Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru, the United States ; Asia - China, India, South Korea, Sri Lanka; Africa - Egypt, Libya, Nigeria; The Near East -Iraq, Syria; and Europe - Austria, Italy, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Russia, Spain. Reportedly 9 other countries were invited to attend but did not send delegates.
Britain, France and Germany which have been repeatedly accused by Egypt of illicitly holding Pharaonic artefacts are not attending.

Greece, one of the countries attending the conference, will chair a session devoted to "problems facing the countries in their attempt to retrieve their antiquities", no doubt drawing on its experiences with its decades-long struggle with London to retrieve the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum.

Since becoming head of antiquities in 2002, Director Zahi Hawass has made reclaiming illegally exported items from Egypt one of the cornerstones of his policy to bring Egyptian archaeology more firmly into the hands of Egyptians. He insists that "what has been stolen from us must be returned", and it is hard to argue with that. Which of course does not stop dealers and some museum directors with atavistic views attempting to do precisely that. This stance is one of the reasons why Hawass is the subject of such a virulent hate-campaign by the lobbyists for an indiscriminate trade in antiquities and its supporters.

* The France 24 video shows some confusing images of replicas of material from Tutankhamen's tomb to accompany thir news report. Most of the many press releases circulating today and yesterday have an identical text.
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Photo: Nefertiti's "I am tired and want to go home" expression.

The Welsh Rosetta Stone? "Y Gymuned Ffyliaid Ebrill" and Repatriation

Just to show that it is not just third world "source countries" which may be accused of "cultural property nationalism" David Gill ("Call for Bluestones to return to Pembrokeshire") draws attention to a breaking news story that seems analagous to the controversy currently being whipped up over the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon Marbles, activists from the aptly-named "Y Gymuned Ffyliaid Ebrill" has called for the symbolic return of one of the bluestones from Salisbury Plain and is sending a delegate to the upcoming Cairo conference on the restitution of cultural property removed from its country of origin. Meanwhile a group of Dolmen enthusiasts is opposing the move and argues that now the stones are removed from their original context, they should stay in their new home where they can be appreciated in the context of the other elements gathered together at this spot in the past. It is this new assemblage which, they argue, is important - rather than the place from which the objects were removed. This story seems worth watching for the drama played out within what is still a United Kingdom may well give insights into the battle over the movement of cultural property across national borders about which there is so much ongoing debate these days. Thanks David for bringing our attention to this weighty (pun intended) issue.