INTER ACTIONone in an occas ional ser ies of art ic les about mult id isc ip l inary teaching and research

Buying, Selling,Owning the Past

CO

LLAG

E By

An

nA

CO

BB;

M

ADE

WIt

H IM

AGES

fRO

M t

HE

CAn

tOR

CEn

tER

fOR

VISu

AL A

RtS

At S

tAn

fORD

un

IVER

SIty

, PA

uL

HARR

ISO

n An

D fL

ICkR

PHO

tOS

By E

RIC

CHA

n, R

OB

In Z

EBRO

WSk

I, n

OAH

GRA

y, L

ARA

EAkI

nS,

An

D DI

MIt

AR D

EnEV

.

Neil Brodie Dan Contreras John Merryman Paul Harrison Tom Seligman Lynn Meskell

JANuARy 28, 2009 STANFORD RepORT 9

Buying, Selling, Owning the Past

10 STANFORD RepORT JANuARy 28, 2009

John Merryman, generally credited

with establishing the field of art law,

is interested in the distinction between

heritage and property. To his mind,

heritage is fuzzy and intangible.

4

Crates of 15th-century objects found at Machu Picchu in the early 20th century today are housed at Yale University, and Peru plans to sue to get them back.

The so-called Elgin Marbles were re-moved from the Parthenon in the early 19th century and taken to London, where they have been displayed ever since. Athens’ new Acropolis Museum

has a wing sitting empty, awaiting their return.Nearly a decade of litigation followed the discovery

of 9,000-year-old skeletal remains near Kennewick, Wash., as American Indian tribes and scientists dis-puted ownership based on “cultural affiliation.”

And the former curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum is on trial in Rome, accused of han-dling illegally excavated antiquities.

Stanford’s archaeologists and other scholars who study the old objects we call “art” or “antiquities” fre-quently find themselves intervening in such contro-versies. The past decades have seen a booming inter-national antiquities market in the context of sharply defined sentiments of nationalism and ownership on the part of former colonies. Violent upheavals such as the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq— all sites of remarkable ancient treasures—fuel the market. National and international bodies, most notably UNESCO, have tried to curtail the illicit traf-ficking. Still, the world’s museums are full of objects that many people think don’t belong there.

There are some, such as Stanford Law School Pro-fessor Emeritus John Merryman (88 and still teach-ing), who say what’s done is done. In his view, ar-chaeologists, including those at Stanford, are too inflexible.

“They say, ‘Collectors are the real looters,’” he said,

shaking his head. “They won’t concede any role to collectors and dealers.”

Merryman, generally cred-ited with establishing the field of art law, is interested in the distinction between heritage and property. To his mind, heritage is fuzzy and intangi-ble, and therefore more easily manipulated by source nations and their champions. Claims of “cultural heritage” do not suf-fice, in his mind, as ownership claims. (The term cultural property first arose with the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property after the massive destruction of World War II.)

Archaeologists criticize Merryman for condoning the buying and selling of unprovenanced antiquities, a mar-ket he considers logical given what he calls “the human appetite for antiqui-ties.” He is the author of an article ar-guing that Lord Elgin’s acquisition of the marbles was legal and ethical for its time, and therefore should not be overturned now.

On the other side is Neil Brodie, cultural heritage resource director at Stanford’s Archaeology Center. He is the former research director of the Illicit Antiq-uities Research Centre at the University of Cambridge and an international expert on looting and the trade in unprovenanced artifacts.

The ownership-heritage argument can be tricky: One could say that pre-Columbian art, for example,

belongs to all of us as humans and therefore should not neces-sarily remain in, for example, Guatemala; or, instead, one could argue that pre-Columbian art is part of Guatemala’s specific heritage, even though Guatemala as such did not exist in the 15th century, and should therefore re-main there.

One of the more prominent participants in this debate is the director of the Art Institute of

Chicago, James Cuno, who argued in a recent book that stewardship and broad access should take priority over legal ownership, given that most countries claiming objects—Greece, Egypt, India, for example—are recent creations.

“That’s fine,” Brodie replied rhetori-cally to Cuno’s argument, “but I’d add that there wasn’t any ‘art’ as we know it until the 18th century either. It’s equally constructed. Objects removed from their context become ‘antiquities.’ The real question is sovereignty, not ownership—the right of a country to have its heritage

laws respected by other countries.” This is also his ob-jection to what he calls Merryman’s “object-centered discourse of ownership.” Instead, he said, let’s look at knowledge, at heritage.

Looting the Middle East“Everyone in this room has seen evidence of loot-

ing, I’m sure,” Stanford archaeologist Daniel Contre-ras recently told an audience at the Archaeology Cen-

John Merryman

L . A . C I C E R OJ O E G E R A n I O The Early Bronze Age cemetery of Bab adh-Dhra near the Dead Sea. The pockmarked soil, visible from above, is evidence of looters’ work.

Neil Brodie and Dan Contreras in front of a projection of the Google Earth map, which they use to study sites in Lebanon.

n E I L B R O D I E

C O u R t E S y P A u L H A R R I S O n

S H A u n C H EW E S & E L I

I R I S & B . G E R A L D C A n t O R C E n t E R f O R V I S u A L A R t S A t S t A n f O R D u n I V E R S I t yE I R I k n E W t H

A terracotta vase, c. 430 B.C., owned by the Cantor Center.

Buying, Selling, Owning the Past

JANuARy 28, 2009 STANFORD RepORT 11

ter. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been at a site where there hasn’t been looting.”

After the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, ar-chaeologist Elizabeth Stone, who teaches at Stony Brook University, wanted to quantify anecdotal in-formation about the pillaging of the “cradle of civili-zation.” Funded by a variety of sources, she obtained satellite images of some 1,800 sites in southern Iraq taken before the invasion. By studying before and af-ter shots, she was able to identify looting patterns that revealed what was being taken and from where.

There are some who insist that reports of looting in Iraq are the result of deluded journalists echoing scholars with an agenda.

Brodie will have none of that. “There is no debate about the looting,” he said. “We know what happened. Media like to think we don’t.”

Inspired by Stone’s example, Brodie and Contre-ras wanted to do something similar for the approxi-mately 9,0000 square kilometers of Jordan. The prob-lem was that satellite images like Stone’s would have cost around $1.6 million, far beyond the resources of the Archaeology Center. So they asked, what about Google Earth? They could pay $400 a year for the deluxe version, put those images next to data gleaned from a good database and then trace the damage.

“We wanted to see if Google Earth would be good enough for this task,” Contreras explained. “Up un-til now, the evidence has been anecdotal. This will be more systematic. We’ll be able to get a much better idea of how many pits there are. And if people say there’s no looting in Jordan, now we’ll be able to say, ‘Oh yes there is.’”

Above all, they wanted to have evidence to counter those who insist on “chance find” stories—tales of sol-itary villagers who discover the odd pot here and there

and sell it to feed their children. Those stories can’t explain how the antiquities markets were flooded with Jordanian Early Bronze Age materials in the 1990s, said Brodie, who believes the looting is an organized response to a market, not the other way around.

Archaeologists are increasingly being trained in geospatial techniques, and there is an active geo-graphic information systems (GIS) community at Stanford. Archaeologists here have used GIS for proj-ects in Mexico and Peru; the Spatial History Project, led by historian Richard White, comprises several re-search paths using GIS; and staff at Branner Library and academic technology specialists are helping schol-ars in many disciplines incorporate GIS into their re-search. Contreras, a Stanford PhD and a lecturer in the Anthropology Department, teaches a course called Digital Methods in Archaeology.

Contreras found that Google Earth was more effec-tive if used in conjunction with GIS software. So he exported the geo-referenced Google images of Jordan into ArcGIS, which makes it possible to precisely esti-mate the extent of looted areas. Looting is detected by the appearance of swaths dotted with pits that from the air look like pockmarks.

“It’s almost like a smoking gun,” Contreras said, if an area near known Bronze Age sites is pockmarked and shortly thereafter the catalogs start advertising those items. “John Merryman says enforcement will never stop the market, and he is partly right. But there is educational potential on the demand side. If buy-ers were shown these images of damage, then they couldn’t have in their head the image of a poor farmer who sells a single pot to feed his children. Instead, there are photos of large-scale, systematic looting, and buyers are participating in the destruction.”

He showed an image of one of the Jordanian sites,

Safi, that has suffered the most looting. “This was in-dustrial scale,” he said, “and the material was headed straight for the antiquities market. So this can be a tool to stimulate policy.”

In theory, Brodie and Contreras say, using Google Earth for tracking looting could be an open-source project. People could add information and photos, monitor particular areas or issue alerts as images re-veal possible pillaging. Such a project also could be combined with a comparative pixel analysis of remote sensing images of pitted landscapes.

The drawbacks to using Google Earth to moni-tor archaeological looting are, principally, two: The images are not always good, and you have to know what you’re looking for. You can’t just scan the globe in hopes of finding pits. Brodie and Contreras chose Jordan because they had a good database with which to compare the images. Contreras will next apply the technique to Peru, his area of expertise, for which he also has a lot of data. So it’s not perfect. But, he said, “I reservedly recommend it.”

from the caves of AfghanistanOne of the chief arguments for removing antiqui-

ties from their site of provenance is safety.“When people say, ‘It’s safer with us,’ I always reply,

‘Look at 9/11.’ There is no guarantee of safety in this world,” said anthropology Professor Lynn Meskell. Beyond the fallacy of physical security, Meskell and others detect (and condemn) elitism in the assump-tion that an old bowl is better off in my city than in your backyard, or in my climate-controlled museum than in your shabby building.

But there are cases that stand out, and Afghanistan obviously is one. By 1996, after the Soviet withdrawal and when the country was torn apart by internal war-

L A R A E A k I n S

Lynn Meskell

12 STANFORD RepORT JANuARy 28, 2009

L . A . C I C E R O

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAG-PRA) http://www.nps.gov/history/nagpra

Cultural Heritage Resource http://www.stanford.edu/group/chr/drupal

Stanford Archaeology Center https://www.stanford.edu/dept/archaeology/cgi-bin/drupal

Schøyen Collection http://www.schoyencollection.com/Buddhism.htm

GIS at Stanford http://gissig.stanford.edu/?cat=1

“Patterns of Looting in Southern Iraq,” by Elizabeth Stone http://www.savingantiquities.org/feature_page.php?featureID=11

“The Market in Iraqi Antiquities 1980-2008,” by Neil Brodie https://www.stanford.edu/group/chr/cgi-bin/drupal/files/Market%20in%20Iraqi%20antiquities%20(2008)%20txt.pdf

R E L A T E D I N F O R M A T I O N

‘Some people say if you return things,

they’ll be lost forever,’

Seligman said. 4

C O u R t E S y O f C A n t O R A R t S C E n t E R

fare, its archaeological sites were ransacked, and it was feared that the Kabul museum’s collections had gone missing. (In fact, museum staff managed to hide and save much of the holdings.) Few archae-ologists or scholars would argue that in the case of intentional destruction or bombing, artifacts should not be removed. (Where they should be held in safe-keeping can be a matter of controversy; the Hoover Institution garnered some unwanted headlines last summer when it was revealed that it was providing a temporary haven for Baath Party records taken out of Baghdad.) Brodie’s position, also that of the pro-fession in general, is that museums or other institu-tions may hold endangered objects in safekeeping, but no money may change hands.

Since the 1990s, and especially after the Taliban blew up the giant Buddhas at Bamiyan in 2001, pro-fessionals both inside and outside Afghanistan have struggled to ensure the survival of manuscripts and artifacts. Paul Harrison, the George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies, is one of the editors of a remarkable collection of ancient Buddhist man-uscripts held by the Schøyen Collection, headquar-tered in Oslo, Norway. That collection also has been the subject of controversy.

Some of the manuscripts—all of which Schøyen asserts were legally obtained—were found in caves. They are among the earliest known Buddhist docu-ments, written in two scripts, Brahmi and Khar-osthi, dating from the second century AD onward.

Learning to read the scripts, Harrison says simply, was “painful,” and thousands of fragments remain to be identified. Through these pieces, he said, “we have learned a new language we had only hypoth-esized about.”

Using carbon testing, colleagues in Berlin and at the University of Washington have dated simi-lar Buddhist manuscripts recently discovered in Afghanistan and Pakistan to the first century AD, said Harrison, a philologist by training. “So the dates have been pushed back, and this is very excit-ing, very big news. Our knowledge of the Buddhist canon is increasing enormously. There was a huge amount of literary activity; we’ve even found frag-ments of a play.”

But the discovery of such remarkable texts was possible only because someone dug them up and sold them on the black market. How they got to Eu-rope is a mystery.

“These objects have no clear provenance,” Harri-son said. “They were accidentally unearthed or dug up by fortune hunters, and there are no records. The objects were smuggled from Afghanistan to Paki-stan, and somehow ended up in London. The col-lectors have had the sense to make them available to us. Our view is that ownership is one thing, but the information belongs to everybody. But, honestly, there is a certain moral unease about the whole thing which is not easily resolved.”

Contreras and Brodie’s position, that it is the market for antiquities that ensures that looting will take place, has echoes in Afghanistan.

“Do researchers owe their discoveries to the smugglers?” Harrison asked rhetorically. “That’s right, you’re in the position of helping create the market. There’s a terrible problem across Asia with

people smuggling pieces, including things that are used in temples, and then they show up in yuppies’ apartments in New York. I mean, dealers come to our [scholarly] conferences. There’s an unholy alliance between dealers and scholars. Partly this is because of all the political upheaval; people flee to the caves, they explore, they find things.”

Ownership of historyTheft and looting may be hard to pin

down, but no one would argue that theft is legal. That, at least, is clear cut. More murky is the matter of history itself. Who can lay claim to Etruscan art? Should Muslims inhabiting formerly Buddhist lands care about the ruins around them? Do the Elgin Marbles belong in Athens? Should objects be shipped back where they came from?

Figuring out the ethics of heritage in-volves weighing the value of the object’s context against the value of the viewer’s gaze; the village versus the mu-seum.

“The value of antiquities is the story of their culture and their use, and when they’re treated only as objects, they lose that,” Con-treras said. “Ownership, context and use add up to a very interest-ing pattern of behavior that tells us about trading, culture, society, gender and so on. One pot out of context doesn’t tell us that.”

Meskell, whose work is in southern Africa, is ada-mant. “We know nothing about these objects outside of their context,” she said. “We look at their design, and they might as well come from Ikea. We look at objects from Mali and we ‘recognize’ them because we have seen them in Ikea. We look with a colonial, imperial gaze. We don’t recognize. We don’t know who made it or why.

“There should be more of an exchange, partner-ship. It’s not our stuff, and we shouldn’t have it just because we can.”

But sorting it out is not simple. Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, has proposed a system of partage, whereby objects of universal value would be shared by the source nation, even if the nation did not exist when the object was created, and the financers of the exploration.

“I think Cuno is disingenuous,” said Tom Selig-man, director of Stanford’s Cantor Center for Visual Arts. “Partage is fine; I have no objection to that. But then he throws in that nation-state stuff. In the absence of Etruscans, you have to speak with Italy. Whom else would you negotiate partage with?”

So, send the stuff back? “Some people say if you return things, they’ll be lost forever,” Seligman said. “Maybe.” He shrugged.

Or maybe not. Who’s to say where objects are better off? Referring to Africa, Meskell said artifacts “must remain with the communities of connection, the most impoverished people. They believe money would flow in if they had them, and maybe they’re

right. They could be used to rebuild the country [through tourism] and help those who most need it. They care about these objects, they know them. Peo-ple in Pretoria and the cities don’t.”

In North America, the most obvious instance of this debate takes place around American Indians and the 1990 federal Native American Graves Pro-tection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), under

which certain objects with “cultural affiliation” to certain descendants and tribes must be returned by museums. At Stanford, anthropologist Michael Wilcox, himself an American Indian, recently was on a task force of the American Anthropological Associa-tion that commented on new modi-fications of the law. Though he sup-ports NAGPRA, he also is troubled by its implications.

“Indian people must demonstrate connections to a past that has been

created by a professional and theoretical dialogue that has explicitly excluded them,” Wilcox wrote. “Indians are asked to demonstrate our rela-tion to the static cultures that archaeologists and museums have affirmed, reproduced and codified in professional journals.”

The web of interests and c la ims enveloping these

shards, bones, sculptures and masks is dense indeed. Law, the legacy of colonialism, aesthetics, human history, property ... it’s not easy to sort out.

“With cases like the Kennewick Man or with the Elgin Marbles, the most important thing is to wrestle with the ideas,” Contreras said. “I don’t have an an-swer. But at least let’s think about it. There are hard-liners on both sides.” SR

Paul Harrison with a computer monitor displaying the Sanskrit texts he is studying. The Sambadhavakasa Sutra, which instructs Buddhists in the practice of meditation. This manuscript is part of a hitherto unknown collection of sutras, which are scriptural texts that are often recited.

‘There should be more of an exchange,

partnership. It’s not our stuff, and we

shouldn’t have it just because we can,’

Meskell said.4