Action Group Set up Opposing Northampton Ancient Egyptian Statue Sale

Northampton Borough Council wants to deaccession and flog off an item from the local museum's collection (BBC News, 'Egyptian statue sale: Action group set-up in opposition 2.11.2012). The object concerned is an ancient Egyptian statue thought to have been given to the museum in 1870. The Conservative-run authority said the statue of Sekhemka worth £2m, would be sold because it was not a "key part" of Northampton's heritage. Locals disagree, the "Save Sekhemka Action Group"  wants the statue to remain as part of the town's collection.

The group is made up of several organisations such as The Northamptonshire Ancient Egyptian Society, Art Fund Northamptonshire and The Friends of Northampton Museums and Art Gallery. Ruth Thomas, vice chairman of Save Sekhemka Action Group (SSAG), said: "The group feels that people need to know about this otherwise this could be the start of us losing many of our valuable assets. "Sekhemka is one of our most important artefacts". SSAG said it has set up a website and Facebook page for the campaign.

The council is unrepentant, Brandon Eldred, cabinet member for community engagement, is quoted by the BBC as saying: "We want to make sure that when we sell it, we raise as much money as possible to reinvest back into our museums and heritage. At the same time, we will ensure the statue does not leave our town for anything less than we feel it is worth". Let us hope that the collectors across the sea who are rubbing their hands in greedy anticipation at the thought of museums all over Europe raising cash by deaccessioning objects for them to buy are watching this attempt to do just what they want very carefully. Have they no sympathies for the people of Northampton? I bet they have actually, because readers might remember the reactions of these same collectors themselves when the news first broke that Egypt wanted the mummy mask of Ka Nefer Nefer in St Louis Art Museum back. 

I wish the SSAG every success against cash grabbing philistinism from the city authorities.

Here's the website:  www.sekhemka.co.uk
Facebook -  facebook.com/Sekhemka
Twitter -  twitter.com/SaveSekhemka
 

In any case, should the piece be deaccessioned because unwanted, Northampton should jolly well send it back to Egypt with a nice thank-you note for letting them look after it for so long. The Borough Council has no record that the Museum purchased it. One can only conclude that it was donated to the Museum, by a donor who intended that it should stay there in perpetuity. It's only dodgy dealers and mafia bosses that seek to raise cash by flogging off other people's art works against their will.

US Customs Curb Import of "Thousands Upon Thousands" of Artefacts Without Export Documentation

.
According to one commenator, when importing dugup artefacts for collection and sale at the moment:

"Americans face [...] requirements that preclude entry of  thousands upon thousands of cultural artifacts,"

they are called export licences, and if US Customs were not looking at the paperwork, we may infer that "thousands upon thousands of artefacts" without any kind of documentation of licit export would be passing onto the US market.  The writer of those words seems to think that US buyers want nothing better than to buy without a second thought smuggled and illicitly obtained dugup artefacts from other countries. Is that the case?

Artful Crafts: Metal Vessels and Painted Pots

.
David Gill  was co-author with Michael Vickers back in the 1990s of a book on Greek pots, Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. This emphasized that decorated Greek cermics owe a great deal to metal prototypes, indeed that the majority are skeuomorphs of vanished metal originals. The thesis was originally met with some opposition, though it is now more generally accepted that many pots were indeed copying metal prototypes. Recently there has been a meeting at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge as part of the 'Not praising, burying' event [details]. Gill's presentation is available online here. He says on "Looting Matters":

At the start of the day I will be reflecting on the central themes of Artful Crafts. It strikes me that one of the central themes has been the way that Greek pottery has been removed from its ancient context and placed in an artificial "artistic" world that has promoted "important" creators. And museums and collectors have sought to acquire works by major names: Artful Crafts preceded the return of material to Italy from North American private collections.

This of course is a key difference between archaeology (the study of the past) and art-history (the study of pretty things). In the antiquities trade items are taken from the archaeological record and commodified as "ancient art". All sorts of arguments are trotted out by dealers and collectors for consumption by the weak-headed, that these objects were "meant" to be seen, and "meant" to be taken to far off lands in the West to be admired. In the majority of cases such speculation can be shown to be ill-founded. Many of the items sold as "ancient art" were more or less utilitarian objects or had other functions quite separate from their aesthetic appearance (Egyptian shabtis are a good example, but then so are many dugup coins - Medieval hammered for instance). Gill discusses some of the reflections resulting from the multidisciplinary gathering in a follow-up post, there will also be a seminar next week.

Over on the coiney forums there was dissent with the views of Professor Gill. One amateur philosopher in particular tried to persuade some of his slack-jawed fellow coin fondlers that Gill's approach was somehow a textbook example of "ethnocentrism" and what he called "anti-transdisciplinarity". The meeting itself is presented to coineys not only as a "subterfuge" but one which is intended to target collectors. I think no comment is necessary, log on and read it for yourselves to get a view into the warped thinking of some coineys.

Obviously the problem is that the idea that we should reassess ideas about "ancient art" going back to Winckelmann and Lord Hamilton sits ill with the assertions of no-questions-asked collectors and dealers about why their careless collecting of decontextualised objects should be accepted on the grounds that it is through this "art" that one can approach its creators. The opposing view, that we can approach the creators of the objects through better knowledge of the context of the making, use and discarding of the objects and items associated with them, bothers them.

Vignette: The Hamilton Collection was initially thought to be of "Etruscan" vases, then when they worked out they and others like them were not, art historical reasoning dated some of them a century too late and it was only archaeological excavations on the Acropolis in Athens that sorted out the chronology for the collectors, who are now attacking archaeologists because they want to preserve sites rather than mine them for commercially-attractive geegaws to collect.

The Great Conspiracy: What "They" Do not want You to Know...

.
In the post above I mentioned attempts by the coiney milieu to dismiss arguments that we should challenge assumptions going back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries about what is called "ancient art". From the ACCG stable, we read a notable example on the Moneta-L forum, discussing something Professor David Gill wrote:

While the anti-collecting lobby has been diminishing greatly over the last year or so, real damage has been done and we can see that it has been used (though the MoU's with various countries) to create quid pro quos, the details of which are protected under U.S. State secrecy laws. Occam's razor, applied to the people and countries involved, would suggest that the reciprocity might well be to do with GMO's - something that carries great public concern. However, the lack of transparency makes it impossible to state this with any certainty.

How convenient for any speculations masquerading as conspiracy theory. So according to this scenario,  the US is agreeing to look at export documentation of some items of cultural property on the basis of a public bilateral MOU, while behind the scenes the CPAC has been rubber-stamping secret protocols involving supplying the same countries with US-made mutant potatoes and five-legged sheep?  The CPAC reports to Congress and is appointed by the President himself. Does he know about the five-legged sheep?

Note also the attempt to convince the Unthinking who swallow such ideas that the anti-illicit antiquities lobby has "diminished greatly over the last year or so". Believing that involves putting blinkers over eyes that already are accustomed to seeing nothing. Over in Glasgow a big well-funded project has just been set up and staffed and is now actively seeking more researchers who are going to be leaving in a couple of years with a lot of ideas about how to (and why we should) fight illicit antiquities. There are all sorts of initiatives going on which certainly do not justify such pessimism.

I imagine the writer of those words has in mind a few isolated cases of cultural heritage preservationist bloggers who have given up in the face of the bullying, trolling and threats that is all the pro-collecting milieu can muster in a vain attempt to stave off the inevitable public debate on illicit antiquities and the current mode of handling them. A relatively small group of people with few scruples is intent on disrupting any public debate on current policies on artefact hunting, collecting and the antiquities trade by such means. 

BM's Treasure Statistics 2010 and 2011.

.

The British Museum Treasure Unit has recently published the statistics on the progress of mandatory reporting in England, Wales and Northern Ireland of items falling under the Treasure Act in  2010 (and the headline number for 2011).

The report sets out the latest figures for reported treasure finds for the 12 months to December 2010.

• Statistical release for treasure (2010 figures) and portable antiquities (figures for 2011) (PDF 235kb)
• Statistical release for treasure (2010 figures) and portable antiquities (figures for 2011) (RTF 1mb)
• Table A: Number of Treasure cases in 2010 by county (geographical distribution) (CSV)
• Table B: Analysis of Treasure cases in 2010 by period and disposition - England and Wales (CSV)
• Table C: Method of discovery of Treasure cases in 2010 - England and Wales (CSV)

Key messages

• In 2011 970 finds of Treasure were reported. The equivalent number for 2010 was 860.
• In 2010 86 parties waived their right to a reward in 70 cases of Treasure, allowing them to be acquired by museums at no (or reduced) public cost.

 So, more and more of Britain's buried heritage is being hoiked out and put on sale. The number of reward waivers is still as regrettably low as in previous years. The numbers of hoards dug up have been rising steadily for the past couple of years, no sign yet of this expansion of Treasure Hunting reaching a plateau value.

Personally I think the PAS are avoiding at least THREE "key messages" here. The first is "how much is this Treasure Hunting all costing"? The second is "how many of these items are being pulled from undisturbed archaeological contexts below plough level?" and the third is "when will this all STOP?". Frankly, I do not think the PAS is ready to answer any of those questions and a few more one could think of.

Note also that the press release is followed by a little box "Be the first to comment on this news story", and has anybody? Do people really care any more about what the PAS is up to? Have they not lost touch really with the public with whom they were supposed to be interacting? They may try to exclude so-called archaeological "trolls" from posting comments, but then where are the rest? This really is eginning to look just a bit pathetic.

Portable Antiquities Scheme "Feelgood Statistics"

.
The Portable Antiquities Scheme has produced its annual "wottalotta-stuff-we-got" feelgood statistics. Whooppee.  The number of objects recorded through the Portable Antiquities Scheme  January 2011 to December 2011 in England and Wales has been gathered by the British Museum on behalf of DCMS. The report is available in rtf and pdf format.

• Statistical release for treasure (2010 figures) and portable antiquities (figures for 2011) (PDF 235kb)
• Statistical release for treasure (2010 figures) and portable antiquities (figures for 2011) (RTF 1mb)
• Table D: Portable Antiquities Scheme (PAS) finds in 2011 objects recorded by county (geographical distribution) (CSV)
• Table E: PAS finds in 2011 recorded by class (where known) (CSV)
• Table F: PAS finds in 2011 recorded by period (where known) (CSV)
• Table G: PAS findspot precision in 2011(where recorded) (CSV)
• Table H: Method of discovery of PAS finds in 2011 (where known) (CSV)
• Table I: Land use if findspot for PAS finds in 2011 (where known) (CSV)
• Table J: Use of PAS website in 2011 (CSV)

"Key message"

• In 2011 97,509 finds were recorded with the Portable Antiquities Scheme. The equivalent number for 2010 was 90,099.

The key message they did not discuss was how many artefact hunters are witholding how many recordable finds and what this means. But they wouldn't, would they?

 

PAS Conference as Reported by Tekkies

.
On Monday 22nd October 2012 the PAS held their annual pep-talk. This year, the theme was: "Objects and Landscape: understanding the medieval period through finds recorded by the Portable Antiquities Scheme" the usual artefact-centric stuff was trotted out. The tekkies saw it a bit differently, as reported in the latest number of "UKDN Word". In the first extract one gets the impression that the PAS condemns landowners who say no to artefact hunting (!):

The Lincolnshire FLO, Adam Daubney, gave a talk about a parish that our very own Tom Redmayne has self-recorded many hundreds of finds from and what can be learnt from such an intense study. He showed that PAS data reflects, enhances and sometimes changes the known archaeological record. He also expanded on the problem that all areas suffer from and that is the blank areas in the archaeological record due to landowners refusing permission for detectorists and others to search their land. Later discussion turned to how, or if it is even possible, for detectorists to be able to record ‘negative’ evidence, in other words, be able to record where your blank fields are, which adds to the overall map of human use of the land. 

Well, let us first note the phrase that "PAS data reflects, enhances" the existing archaeological record, in other words, much of the searching is being done on sites which are already known. Supporters of artefact hunting can deny it as much as they like, until they are blue in the face, but here we have it in black and white. But what on earth is meant by an area "suffering from" a lack of plundering of collectables? That, Mr Daubney, is called archaeological preservation, and it is a shame that FLOs are not encouraging engaging in more of it.

Note the lack of a mention here of "blanks"  caused by thousands of artefact hunters hoiking stuff out over the years and not reporting it.

The second abstract (also sent me by Nigel Swift) refers to something else. Somebody saying something they did not mean to - fortunately for them, even the tekkie thought it would be indiscrete to reveal their name:

Towards the end of the day a discussion session was held where those who had given the talks where (sic) asked questions or to comment further on a certain point. There was one person who questioned finds being found in plough soil being of any research use. He was comprehensively put back in his box by his fellow archaeologists.

In other words, the artefact assemblages of disturbed plough soil are archaeologically significant. Quelle surprise.