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> debating the ethical cost of studying antiquities that were almost certainly stolen
what we do here is whatever we can find illegally traded gets expropriated, verified and if it turns out it's real documented and returned where it belonged.
not really an ethical conundrum doing so because there's no incentive for looters, as the artifacts are not bought.
i.e. http://bari.repubblica.it/cronaca/2017/10/06/news/foggia_rec...
> not really an ethical conundrum doing so because there's no incentive for looters, as the artifacts are not bought.
''A cultural property expert warned Hobby Lobby’s in-house counsel about the artifacts, saying they may have been looted from archaeological sites in Iraq. Still, Hobby Lobby signed a purchase agreement for $1.6 million in December 2010, wiring the money to seven different bank accounts. ''
I think LoSboccacc is saying is that the way they (by which I assume is meant Italians, as per the link) deal with it doesn't have ethical problems.
some additional thoughts, I am not well versed enough in the Hobby Lobby story to have a good opinion on it.
What is not stolen today can be considered stolen tomorrow with changes in governments on either side. Then there are those lost to conquest.
There were recent stories about Ethiopia demanding back items lost in war [1]. The concerns must be, are they better back where they came from and are they even owned by who is now in power? the other concern is how are they protected by changes in who controls a region? We already witnessed what groups like ISIS are willing to do.
so my real questions are.
How recent must a change in possession occur for it to have relevance on who owns something? Does the means of how possession was done account for anything?
I hope these international conventions at least partly answer your questions:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Convention_on_the_Means...
- https://www.unidroit.org/instruments/cultural-property/1995-...
> the other concern is how are they protected by changes in who controls a region? We already witnessed what groups like ISIS are willing to do
How are they protected from changes in who controls their current region? We've already seen that the British are willing to grab what they find important and torch everything else...
> Texts from Irisagrig were scattered everywhere, some popping up on eBay and at auction sites, and as far and wide as Australia and South America.
This makes me so sad. With all those looting going on, whether in Iraq, Syria or Egypt, we lose our history. With all those artifacts scattered all over the world, the scientists straggle to reconstruct the history because of the lost context.
I understand, this all comes down to money at the end of the day, but on at least ethical grounds (not to mention the legal ones) Ebay and other auction houses bear the responsibility for looting practices, encouraging the looters. They have to work on some mechanism to make it stop, like a strict provenance control policy before the objects are listed for sale.
They have to work on some mechanism to make it stop, like a strict provenance control policy before the objects are listed for sale.
This is the obvious response to these kinds of situations, but is it actually a good solution? What if the visibility provided by having them on eBay is more helpful in tracking these items down, compared to having these deal happen on more "underground" markets?
We don't particularly care who has these items, but we want to remove incentives for randomly digging them up. The archeological value of documenting the context of an item is larger than any analysis of item itself, and once an item is removed to be sold, that contextual value is permanently destroyed.
Gaining an ability to track and possibly recover existing artifacts is nice to have, but it's actually harmful if it means creating a financial motivation for removing new artifacts and thus destroying the context for them; ideally, we want to create a situation where they get left in the ground because it's not worth for the looters to spend effort digging them up.
Maybe we should create incentives for people to sell items with their context.
Then most of them will have to admit the object was looted.The items that are legally acquired are always losted with their provenance.
I don't think there is only one good solution for this. This is a very complex problem, which, in my opinion, needs diverse approaches and combined co-operations of the governments, museums, and international and intergovernmental institutions (like ICOM, for example) and agencies (like UNESCO) and organizations (like UNIDROIT).
There are already a couple of conventions (some of them I have posted in the comment below), which proved to be ineffective in the face of Iraqi (destroyed sites of Nineveh, looted Mosul museum and Mari temple, etc.) and Syrian(destroyed Palmyra) wars and not only (forever lost Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan). Those international conventions will never be 100% effective, unless all parties are involved and working on the problem and websites like Ebay and the auction houses have to be part of it.
What would be of a great help in this whole story, is if the cyber security specialists (please correct me if I used the wrong term for it)would co-operate and help track down the black markets.
I'm not a specialist myself and I believe there are far more experienced people working on this problem already. I just think that a combination of 'powers' would bring far more effective results.
First, this story was reported in 2015 already (https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-feds-investigate-hob...) and the 1992 novel Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson had a plotline very similar to this, where a Christian evangelical is smuggling in Sumerian artifacts to try to find an ancient code to unlock the brainstem and encode his 'program' -- Hobby Lobby's CEO David Green ~= Snowcrash's L. Bob Rife
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I have no ethical problems with compensating people for getting priceless cultural artifacts outside of war zones. I similarly have no problems with evangelical Christians paying for archaeological research that no one else seems to be bothered to do.
There are worse places for these artifacts to be.
Yes, I'm aware this is a business model for ISIL. I wish them as much success in this endeavor as they can achieve. Please nobody tell them that they're never going to be able to outspend the US Government. We wouldn't want them to stop.
Context is king in archaeology. The precise location of an artifact in relation to other artifacts and features around it tells us far more than just examining the artifacts on their own. ISIL is not conducting rigorous digs, recording context, and publishing data. They're just digging stuff up and selling it.
Every dollar paid to ISIL for what they dig up directly funds the destruction of history. It would actually be a lesser crime to pay them to leave stuff in the ground.
Studying these artifacts now is damage control. We could have learned more from them if we knew their context, but we never will. However, there's no reason not to confiscate and study them. I sincerely hope Lobby Hobby is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. People need to understand that what they did destroys history rather than preserves it.
Are they really digging this stuff up? Sounds like a lot of work. I was under the impression that they were taking it from existing museums and private collections.
Here's some good article about their vandalism: https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/stealing-from-histor...
Yes, smuggling them out of war zones does seem better than having them destroyed like these: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/150901-isis-dest...