[MSN] Finders, keepers. As museums ship ancient treasures back to the countries where they were found, some are now saying: Enough.

[MSN]

Finders, keepers
As museums ship ancient treasures back to the countries where they were
found, some are now saying: Enough.

By Drake Bennett  |  February 10, 2008

ON THE FIRST floor of Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, in the early Greek art
galleries, there is a long display case filled with Athenian ceramics. In
one corner, partway up the linen backing, are two holes, a couple of inches
apart, where a shelf holding a small, 2,500-year-old oil flask was once
attached. Upstairs, in the Imperial Roman galleries, a group of marble busts
and statues has been rearranged after the departure of a 6-foot-tall marble
statue of the Roman empress Sabina. Ten Greek pots and one carved marble
fragment from Imperial Rome are also gone from the museum's collection.

All the pieces were given to the government of Italy, and are now part of a
blockbuster exhibition, in Rome's Quirinal Palace, made up entirely of
pieces alleged to have been looted and smuggled out of Italy. The show's
title, "Nostoi" - from a lost epic poem recounting the perilous homeward
voyages of Greek heroes after the Trojan War - is a nod to the labors of the
Italian culture ministry and police, whose campaign of persistent
arm-twisting, public criticism, and criminal prosecution secured the return
of the 68 artifacts in the show, each now the property of the Italian
government.

These returned objects are only the most visible recent fruits of a powerful
movement aimed at moving some of the world's most prominent ancient
treasures from the hands of foreign museums and collectors back to the
so-called source countries. Along with Italy, the governments of Greece,
Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Turkey, China, and Cambodia, among others,
have pushed to reclaim prized artifacts from collections around the world.

They have tightened their laws governing the export of antiquities or
intensified the enforcement of existing laws and international agreements;
they have made impassioned public cases on the world stage.

These governments argue that to allow such objects to remain abroad as
trophies only encourages the continued pillage of their national patrimony.
Their position has won broad moral support and increasingly become the norm
among academic archeologists, who see ancient objects as historic artifacts
inseparable from their place of discovery. It has forced major concessions
from great museums around the world, including the MFA, the J. Paul Getty
Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The British Museum
is under persistent pressure to return the Elgin Marbles, its famous set of
sculptures from the Parthenon.

But as one museum after another negotiates deals, and prosecutors all over
the world target the commercial trade in ancient objects, some prominent
scholars are drawing a line in the sand, saying that objects belong where
they are - that the movement is based on a false reading of history, and, if
allowed to progress, could do serious damage to the world's cultural
inheritance.

"What's at stake," says James Cuno, the director of the Art Institute of
Chicago, "is the world's right to broad and general access to its ancient
heritage."

Cuno, the former head of Harvard's art museums and someone often mentioned
as a possible successor to Philippe de Montebello, the retiring director of
the Metropolitan Museum, is this spring publishing a book-length argument
against returning cultural artifacts, "Who Owns Antiquity?" Cuno, who is
among the most vocal and prominent voices in the debate, argues that laws
meant to keep antiquities in the countries where they're found are
wrongheaded and counterproductive. They limit the number of people who can
see the objects, he says, while putting artworks at risk and driving
collectors and dealers into the black market. They also present an
existential threat to great "encyclopedic" museums like the MFA or
Metropolitan Museum, places that provide a unique opportunity to see the
full breadth and diversity of the world's cultural history in one place.

Such arguments have triggered fierce responses, not only from source country
governments, but from archeologists who see in the recent repatriations and
prosecutions the best chance for protecting the fragile sites from which
antiquities are too often looted. Ricardo Elia, chair of the archeology
department at Boston University and an expert on the problem of looting,
describes Cuno as an "aesthetic fundamentalist" willing to ignore ethical
and archeological values to get his hands on pretty objects. Cuno's
argument, many of his critics charge, is simply an endorsement of plunder.

Many curators and collectors are more cautious in their public remarks than
Cuno. But the clash between Cuno and his critics is a battle between two
very different philosophies, one that sees antiquities primarily as art, the
other casting their value in terms of the historical information they
provide. How the argument plays out will determine the way human history is
dug up, studied, and displayed. And it will determine, too, what it means to
own a piece of the ancient past.

The dispute over where the world's antiquities belong goes back centuries,
but recent years have seen an intensification of repatriation campaigns, and
a string of victories for the source countries. Among the returned items in
the "Nostoi" exhibition is the Euphronios Krater, a dramatic Greek bowl that
Italy had been demanding back from the Metropolitan Museum almost since the
museum bought it in 1972, for $1 million, from an art dealer now on trial in
Rome for conspiring to sell looted antiquities. A year ago, Greece won the
long-sought return of a gold wreath and statue from the Getty Museum.

In addition, federal officials are investigating an alleged Asian
antiquities smuggling ring that sold pieces to a few Southern California
museums and a trustee of the Art Institute of Chicago. And last month, the
oldest antiquities dispute of them all, over the Elgin Marbles, was
reignited when the Greek-Cypriot billionaire owner of easyJet added his
voice and resources to the battle to reclaim the famed sculptures from the
British Museum, where they have been displayed since being prized off the
Parthenon 200 years ago.

The problem with these seemingly laudable efforts, according to Cuno, is
that they're not really about the artifacts, but about politics. The young
governments of Greece and Turkey, he points out, used their antiquities, and
the laws restricting their export, as a way of forging a national political
identity. The Greek government's dogged campaign to recover the Elgin
Marbles is one example. The Turkish government's claim of ownership over the
relics of ancient Kurdish culture found within its national borders -
objects that, if owned by the Kurds themselves, might fuel their separatist
ambitions - is another.

In many cases the nations asserting rights to artifacts have little in
common, culturally, religiously, artistically, or even ethnically, with the
civilizations buried beneath them. Modern Peru, for example, was built in
the vacuum left by the systematic destruction of the Inca civilization,
whose legacy the country now claims. "It is a stretch of the imagination,"
says Cuno, "to link modern Egypt to ancient Egypt, modern Greece to ancient
Greece, modern Rome to ancient Rome, communist China to ancient China."
Nonetheless, countries like Italy, Greece, Turkey, China, and many others
have laws that make any antiquity found on their soil automatically the
property of the state.

The demands of this nationalistic system, its critics say, can sometimes
overrule the best interests of the artifacts. In a 2006 essay in the New
York Review of Books, the philosopher and Princeton professor Kwame Anthony
Appiah argued that such laws have even destroyed antiquities. Soon after the
Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, Appiah pointed out, it was a UNESCO
treaty prohibiting the removal of antiquities from their country of origin
that prevented concerned scholars from rescuing pre-Islamic artifacts before
the Taliban, branding them idolatrous objects, destroyed them.

"Would the ideologues of cultural nativism...find solace in the fact that
these works were destroyed by Afghan hands, on Afghan soil?" Appiah wrote.

Even at museums that have made substantial changes to their acquisition
policies, there is discomfort with some of the language of repatriation, and
with the sweeping nature of some source country laws. Kimerly Rorschach, the
director of Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art, is seen by archeologists
as someone who listens to their concerns. She is quick to describe her alarm
at the problem of looting and smuggled artworks. But she is also critical of
the idea that, as she puts it, "All objects from these ancient civilizations
must be distributed to people who descend from them - or who may not descend
from that civilization but inhabit the same geographical region."

Better, many in the museum world insist, to let some of these treasures find
a home in encyclopedic museums - cosmopolitan institutions where the age-old
interpenetration of cultures is brought into relief - rather than
restricting them to more homogenous national museums.

"We should recognize that a great deal of knowledge, cross-fertilization,
and exchange can come from objects moving across borders," Philippe de
Montebello wrote in an essay, "Whose Culture Is It?," published in the
Berlin Journal last fall.

Archeologists don't deny the value of cross-border cultural exchange, or of
bringing ancient treasures to the widest possible audience. The problem,
they argue, is that the lucrative antiquities market inevitably creates
incentives for looters. According to archeologists who study the issue, a
significant portion of artifacts on the market today, and in the collections
of many major museums, were looted - illegally dug up for the sole purpose
of profit. David Gill, an archeologist at Wales's Swansea University,
examined the sales of Egyptian antiquities from Sotheby's from 1998 to 2007
and found that 95 percent of the objects could not be traced back to the
place where they had been dug up. Not all of those pieces, he says, were
necessarily looted, but many were.

For archeologists, the problem with looting is not simply that it is
stealing, but that it destroys archeological sites, erasing irreplaceable
information. A funerary jug scrubbed clean and presented for sale to a
museum has far less to offer an archeologist than one found in the ground,
where everything from its location and positioning to its contents and the
composition of the soil around it - in short, its context - can offer clues
to the sort of culture that made and preserved it.

To illustrate the point, Brian Rose, president of the Archaeological
Institute of America and an archeology professor at the University of
Pennsylvania (and a curator at the university museum), gives the example of
a site called Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. Under excavation since
1994, it is the oldest known temple complex in the world, predating
Stonehenge by 7,000 years. If it had been looted, and its pillars and
carvings brought onto the market with no context, Rose argues, "they
probably would have been branded as forgeries" because their existence so
fundamentally challenged archeologists' understanding of the earliest eras
of human history.

The value of the current system to archeologists is that source countries
like Italy and Greece, whatever their motivation, have proven better
protectors of dig sites than museums have. "I think the nation-states are
trying to do a good job of maintaining and protecting their antiquities,"
says Malcolm Bell, an archeology professor at the University of Virginia and
the leader of a dig at the ancient Greek colony of Morgantina, in Sicily,
the source of a collection of looted silver recently returned to Italy from
the Met.

To Bell and other archeologists, the recent repatriation campaigns are less
a form of national chest-thumping than part of a healthy long-term shift in
archeology, away from treasure hunts run by museums and wealthy explorers
and toward long-term digs managed in cooperation with host countries. Most
of the laws and international accords governing the antiquities trade
tacitly acknowledge that standards have changed over the years, and only
target objects that may have been looted in recent decades.

Cuno, for his part, believes that it's the laws themselves that encourage
the black market in antiquities, much as 90 years ago Prohibition spurred
the rise of the Mob. Private collectors are a fact of life, he argues. Since
source country export restrictions make it so much harder to legally
purchase antiquities, dealers and collectors are driven into the black
market. Cuno would like to see a loosening of those laws to allow for a
larger licit trade in antiquities. Perhaps, he suggests, source countries
could arrange to set aside some portion of the artifacts unearthed on
archeological digs for sale, or they could bar only those antiquities they
were willing to buy from the owner from leaving the country. As the legal
market grew, he predicts, the black market would correspondingly shrink.

To archeologists, this position is unconscionable. Some even wonder if the
world would not be better off without a market in antiquities. In this view,
the fundamental problem is that antiquities can be private property. Why
not, they argue, treat antiquities the way we treat African ivory, as
something that, with a few exceptions, can't be bought and sold at all?

Drake Bennett is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail drbennett at globe.com.