TOO MANY LOST TREASURES

HERSHEL SHANKS

New ways to stem archaelogical looting

The looting of archaeological sites is a worldwide scourge. In wartime (and occasionally in peacetime), even museums are not immune from looting and theft. While the original estimate of 170,000 artifacts looted from Iraq’s National Museum proved to be a wild exaggeration, the current estimate of 12,000-13,000 missing items, including 5,000 cylinder seals, is still a big number. And Iraq is just the latest example. Other cases of looted artifacts abound.

Over 15,000 Apulian vases have been looted in southern Italy. North of Rome, Etruscan tombs are a fertile treasure chest for looters. Little remains of the West Bank’s Tell Beit Mirsim site, where the great biblical archaeologist William Foxwell Albright fixed the chronology of Palestinian pottery. In Jordan, Early Bronze Age pottery is spilling out of Bab Edh-Dhra. Southeast of the Dead Sea, inscribed tombstones in Greek and Hebrew are dug up by impoverished Jordanian farmers.Across the globe, historical treasures are vanishing, their stories left unstudied by scholars.

The position of the archaeological establishment for addressing this abysmal situation is, to my mind, quixotic and ineffective. It hasn’t worked and it won’t work. The answer of organizations like the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), and the American Oriental Society (AOS) is to send in the cops to search for looted objects, impose strict import controls from archaeologically rich countries, vilify collectors, attempt to drive antiquities dealers out of business by making them illegal, and castigate museums that buy and display unprovenanced artifacts (i.e., artifacts without a demonstrated history). Most inane of all, these organizations forbid scholars from publishing articles about unprovenanced finds in scholarly journals, or presenting scholarly papers on such finds at their meetings. Instead, avert your eyes, they tell scholars, and pretend unprovenanced articles simply don’t exist. The theory is that all these efforts will dry up the market, so there will be no incentive to loot.

Of course, that is not the effect at all. The only thing the policy of the archaeological establishment does is drive the market underground. Rather than being recovered, these looted artifacts are whisked away to Geneva, London, or Tokyo, and we never hear of them again. In this way, scholars are denied the opportunity to learn from these looted treasures. An example: In the years after the first Gulf war, approximately 4,000 objects were looted in Iraq. Somewhere between 4 and 12 items were recovered. So much for the cops-and-robbers approach.

The archaeological establishment contends that unprovenanced artifacts are worthless because they lack a context. Certainly, much more might be revealed if we knew where these objects came from and the precise archaeological environment from which they were excavated. Given a choice between a looted object and a professionally excavated artifact, all scholars certainly would choose the latter. But that is not the choice. Our choice is between studying a looted artifact, or no artifact at all. The archaeological establishment says an object without a context is worthless. My answer is that it may be worth less, but it is not worthless.

Perhaps if this attitude of the archaeological establishment had any hope of substantially reducing looting, it would be worth the sacrifice of not having the knowledge that even looted objects can provide. The fact is, however, the archaeological establishment’s policy is not reducing looting a whit. All it does is give the archaeological organizations that follow this policy a warm fuzzy feeling generated by moral posturing.

STUDYING UNPROVENANCED OBJECTS

After the National Museum in Baghdad was looted, I wrote op-ed pieces in the The Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune saying that the best way to recover the looted material was to buy it. The price would be cheapest while it was still in Iraq.With each sale, the price would go up. The general counsel of the Field Museum in Chicago wrote a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune saying that the only people who agreed with me were Donald Rumsfeld and Philippe de Montebello.Well, that’s not such bad company.

Within the scholarly community, however, the support for the position I am advocating is strong. But it is characterized by deeds more than words. The reality is that scholars continue to publish articles about unprovenanced pieces, including objects that come from the antiquities market.

Every epigrapher, or specialist in ancient inscriptions, agrees that you must look at unprovenanced inscriptions. Many of the most important ancient Near East inscriptions have surfaced on the antiquities market, rather than via legitimate, professional excavations. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a prime example. Most of them were looted by the Bedouin a half-century ago. The scholars at the time had the good sense to purchase them from antiquities dealers, who served as middlemen between the looters and the scholars. Indeed, the scholars even hired the looters to continue their work under proper archaeological supervision.

All the leading paleographers publish unprovenanced inscriptions. Frank Cross of Harvard, P. Kyle McCarter of Johns Hopkins, Joseph Naveh of Hebrew University, and Andre Lemaire of the Sorbonne are but a few examples. Biblical historians also cannot ignore the important inscriptions that are found in the antiquities market. Thus, the Israel Exploration Journal, the journal of the Israel Exploration Society, regularly publishes inscriptions found in the antiquities market, although the journals of the AIA, ASOR, and AOS do not.

Admittedly, studying unprovenanced artifacts raises the possibility of forgeries. Everything that comes from the antiquities market comes with suspicion. Sometimes a forgery is obvious.At other times, one factor or another assures us of authenticity. And sometimes we must live with uncertainty, but this is not unusual in ancient history. Even things that are discovered and documented in a professional excavation are subject to wildly different interpretations of what they mean. If you want certainty, go into mathematics; don’t go into ancient history. Of course, theoretically, even artifacts that come from a professional excavation can be forgeries, salted by some worker. It has happened. The opposite scenario also happens on occasion, as workers may be tempted to steal an excavated object before it is registered.

A word here about the now-famous ossuary, or bone box, inscribed “James son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) has declared it to be a forgery. That ruling is not the end of the story, though it is not clear what the ultimate outcome will be. However, a number of scholars already have pointed out that the IAA report is deeply flawed. For example, the report states that the supposedly fake patina could have been produced to disguise the forged inscription, OR it could have been the result of a vigorous cleaning of the inscription.

The IAA never considered the second alternative, which was a possibility pointed out by the IAA scientists themselves. And it is common knowledge that antiquities dealers customarily clean engraved inscriptions on stones to make them “show” better. Moreover, the IAA scientists cannot satisfactorily explain how the supposedly fake patina was made; their suggestion won’t work. In addition, many scholars are questioning whether the issue should be settled by a committee set up as a kind of court, or whether the issue should be decided in the customary way—by scholarly discussion and the publication of varying views until a consensus is reached. The issue is extremely complex. It involves politics, the antiquities market, and rumors demonstrated to be false, as well as science and epigraphy. If the inscription (or part of it) is a forgery, we all want to know it. But the investigation of the matter has been mishandled and the IAA has failed to demonstrate that the ossuary inscription is a forgery.

Epigraphers are not the only specialists who must look to the antiquities market to keep abreast of their field of study. Numismatists, too, recognize that over 90 percent of the ancient coins they study come from the antiquities market. It simply is impossible to be a numismatist without studying these coins. Similarly, art historians cannot be well-informed unless they are familiar, for example, with a Euphronios vase that comes to us from the antiquities market.

We have privatized airlines and schools, so why not archaeological excavations?

Can anything be done, realistically, to reduce, if not eliminate, looting? The smug, holier-than-thou attitude of the archaeological establishment has had no effect whatever—except to prevent consideration of what might be called market-based strategies. Here are some ideas:

Provide better surveillance and law enforcement— While these steps are just a beginning, they must be emphasized.Most countries do a poor job of protecting their archaeological heritage. The head of the Carabinieri in Italy told me that getting caught looting there is like getting a parking ticket. True, the situation in a war-torn nation like Iraq is considerably more difficult. But in most places there is much more we can do in addition to sending the police out on night raids, including experimenting with electronic fences to protect important archaeological sites. Certainly when we know a site is being looted—and that it is a long-term project for looters—we can protect the site with an electronic fence that will alert police to an unauthorized entry.

Hire locals to protect or even excavate important sites—Giving local inhabitants a vested interest in protecting local treasures can help discourage looting. This approach can be especially effective if combined with a professional excavation in which local people are hired as excavators. Conceivably, this strategy might work to stem the looting of certain sites in Iraq.

Sell off duplicate items—In Israel, Jordan, and the West Bank, most of the looting is for low-end items like clay pots and oil lamps. There are thousands and thousands of these items already in storage. Selling these duplicates, which simply gather dust in old storerooms, might put the looters out of business, or at least depress their business. The director of the Israel Antiquities Authority is said to favor this policy, though certainly not all archaeologists are in agreement on the issue. In southern Iraq, sites are being looted largely of cuneiform tablets. The museums, universities, and archaeological institutes of the world already have hundreds of thousands of cuneiform tablets, and many of them have been lying around unpublished for more than a century. The fact is that most of these tablets evidence ordinary commercial or administrative transactions. Why not allow the ordinary tablets to be sold, provided they first are photographed, transcribed, and translated, and the data entered on a computer and made available on the Internet? All of these steps could be financed by the sales proceeds. There even could be a provision that the purchaser would be required to return a tablet if it is needed later for research. Is this a perfect solution? No. But that should not be the question. The question is whether it is better than other alternatives.

Excavate sites that are being looted—It should be possible to finance a professional excavation by selling some of the finds, instead of leaving the site to be plundered by looters. That may be the lesser of two evils. Even field archaeologists sometimes express sympathy for looters because they loot to earn the money to feed their families.Why not employ these people, supervised by a professionally trained archaeologist, to excavate the site? And why not finance the excavation by selling off some of the less-important artifacts once they have been studied and documented? Incidentally, when Dead Sea Scroll archaeologists caught the Bedouin looting a cave of immensely important documents, they hired the Bedouin to continue the excavation under proper supervision.

Consider the possibility of privately financed excavations —We have privatized airlines and schools, so why not archaeological excavations? Perhaps it’s time to consider selling sites that are being looted to a private archaeological company that would be permitted to finance the excavation by selling some of the finds after they have been studied and published. Wouldn’t this solution be better than leaving the site to the looters? You can be sure that a private company would take adequate measures to protect its site from looters.

These are just a few possible scenarios to reduce the looting of archaeological sites worldwide. All of the ideas mentioned may not be good ones. But let’s have a conversation, and at least discuss them. Then let’s experiment, and determine which approaches work, and which do not. Surely this is a better option than the current stance of many archaeological organizations, an approach that has no effect on looting and simply results in the permanent loss of valuable information to scholars and the public alike.

Hershel Shanks (CC ’00) is the founder and editor of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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