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Scholars, Looters and Stewardship of the Past
Sarah Kansa · San Francisco, CA (United States) · Dec 14th, 2007 11:22 pm · 52 votes · 2 comments
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At a brunch gathering I attended recently, a guest casually mentioned that they were reading a book about Heinrich Schliemann, the German excavator at Troy, who removed archaeological treasures from Turkey in the late 19th century. There were nods and chuckles as people recalled the (probably fictitious) story of Schliemann “saving” what he named “Priam’s Treasure” by whisking the quickly excavated objects away in his wife’s skirt (though one wonders how his wife managed to carry, among other objects, a copper shield, a copper cauldron, and over a dozen lance heads, axes and vases in her skirt, all over the course of one “lunch break” during the excavation). Why does this story make people smile? Is it the vision of his wife smuggling items in her skirt? Perhaps. Or is it because this is a classic story that every kid dreams about—of discovering ancient buried treasure that will make you rich and famous?
The public face of archaeology in American culture is Indiana Jones, Tomb Raider and The Mummy, a picture of Western adventurers running around the jungle or desert “saving” treasures from various baddies. While these pop culture icons popularize archaeology, they are also playing to that inner kid in all of us who yearns for buried treasure, placing the value of the objects themselves over the value of context in which they were found. However, every object comes from a specific place and stands in relation to other objects and traces around it that give it meaning. Indiana Jones’ classic line is “This belongs in a museum!” Yet he runs around wreaking havoc around the globe and ripping artifacts out of tombs, temples and so on without a second thought, a crime professional archaeologists would equate with straightforward plunder.
Whether Schliemann’s story of recovering these objects is fact or fiction, his “excavation technique” was, in my mind, akin to looting. Looting in the name of “saving” objects was, unfortunately, a common occurrence in the past. (Ironically, part of “Priam’s Treasure” disappeared from its “safe” home in Germany during WWII and, though it was rediscovered much later in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, debate continues over who it "belongs" to—Germany , Russia, Turkey or Greece.) Looting continues to this day in different forms. Outright looting to serve a demand for antiquities on the part of collectors and traders is one form. However, there is a more discreet form of looting that is less well recognized in academic circles and that leaves the public out altogether.
While archaeological excavations are generally well documented, some might see a failure to publish as akin to looting a site. One astonishing study found that only 27 percent of projects that received funding from a foundation that specifically gave grants for publication, ever actually saw publication! The results from other funding bodies that don’t mandate publication must be even grimmer. Many would see this failure to publish materials that have been removed in destructive excavation and not publicly documented as on par with traditional looting.
Researchers typically go to great lengths to set themselves apart from antiquities traders and looters. However, the area of intellectual property may be a context where the distinctions between antiquities trader and scholar are more problematic. In the academic context, analysis, knowledge and representations of cultural heritage are seen as appropriate to be bought, sold, and traded. Much of this is heavily invested with institutional, career, grant, and prestige competition. On the other hand looters, by their focus on physical remains, are seen as agents of destruction. Looters destroy contextual information and thereby destroy interpretive possibilities and potential knowledge of the past. However, professional pressures to keep results secret until published (and, then, if published at all, in limited and highly selective and synthesized forms) limit potential interpretation.
In this way, the lack of full and transparent disclosure of archaeological documentation can be seen as similar to the destruction of contextual information by more classic looters, where both making a commodity of the past for different gains. Thus, even in the academic world where professional ethics demand prompt publication and sharing is expected, professional pressures can create incentives for secrecy and a sense that the record of the past is a personal resource to advance one’s career first and foremost, only to be shared once personal gain is assured.
tags: united states education local-context-global-commons archaeology looting publish-or-perish
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