Social Media

For those of you who like this sort of thing, the University of Glasgow cultural property trafficking project is now on facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/TraffickingCulture 

and twitter

https://twitter.com/#!/CultureTraffic

We are in the process of getting an exciting website full of content up and running but this can tide y'all over until the website is deployed!

Provenance Pitfalls, Lost Jewels, and Glasgow Airport

More in Glasgow illicit cultural property news, various news outlets, including the Independent, are reporting that the Duchess of Argyll  lost about 100,000 pounds worth of jewelry in the Glasgow airport in 2006.  She reported them lost/stolen to the airport police, to the general police, and filed them as missing in the art loss register. Basically, she did everything one can do in such a situation.

And then, and then, she found her Cartier brooch in a Lyon & Turnbull auction catalogue now, in 2012.

Come to find out that the BAA held the jewels in the lost and found for a few months until some internal time limit was met and then sold them to a diamond merchant for 5,000 pounds. The merchant then sold the stuff on and at least one of those buyers put their purchase up for auction.

The media seems to be pointing a lot of fingers at the BAA. Yes, they committed the first insane mistake: not informing the Glasgow police that they had a bag full of jewels in their lost and found. Yet  I am interested in the fact that (1) the diamond dealer, (2) the diamond buyer, and (3) the auction house didn't bother to take a peek at the art loss register before they made their respective purchases. And with that in mind we delve into the murky world of provenance.

Provenance. Ownership history. Who you bought that thing from. We talk so much about the provenance of an object being used to legitimise it, even when it is illicit. Usually we present this as being a nefarious plot on the part of antiquities smugglers: mix in some fake provenances, Anonymous Swiss Collectors if you will, and dirty cultural property is eventually clean. But it isn't always like that.

I think this case illustrates the amazing power of provenance in a case where no one was specifically trying to fool anyone else. Why didn't the diamond dealer check the Art Loss Register before s/he purchased the items? Because s/he bought them from a UK government agency! Why didn't the jewelry buyer check the ALR? Because the dealer bought them from a UK government agency! Why didn't the auction house check the ALR? Because they consigned them from a buyer who bought them from a dealer, who bought them from a UK government agency. Heck, I would even think everything was above board!

As someone who has been staring at terrible and opaque auction house data for the past two weeks, that is about the cleanest provenance one could hope for. And yet the cultural property was totally illicit. A government agency failure created a false sense of legitimacy and everyone involved got totally hosed.

Okay, yes, if I ran an auction house or did any sort of object buying (of non antiquities of course) for a business, I would have an 100% Art Loss Register check policy at the very least. A single search is 60 pounds. That would be a cost built into my business model: something that anyone who wanted me to buy something or consign something would have to submit to. Sure, yes, 60 pounds a pop adds up but it prevents you from looking terrible in public.

Not to mention that the Duchess is married to the chief of Clan Campbell and could potentially unleash some sort of Scottish kilted blood feud on you.

In the future, Glasgow airport, when you think you have an illicit cultural property issue on your hands you can give me a ring. I can be there on the bus in 20 minutes. I probably can't do much for you, but I could at least offer my expert opinion ("someone is looking for this, call the police") and, you know, try on the tiara and practice my queen wave (let's call that "authentication services").

Update: Location, Research and Ideas

Although I don't particularly like this blog to swing into the personal, I have been told by a person wiser than myself that I should be a bit more forthcoming about where I am at and why. He is right. This blog exists mostly to toss my random ideas out there, but if any of them stick on anyone I would like them to get in touch. So here it is folks:

In the past month I have received my PhD in Archaeology at the University of Cambridge and I have moved to the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research at the University of Glasgow. I am now working with Simon Mackenzie, Neil Brodie, and Suzie Thomas on that well-funded Illicit Antiquities/Criminal Networks project that people have been buzzing about.

I've been awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and a Core Fulbright Scholar Award to do this. Geographically, I will be focusing on Latin America with a bit of a weight on Andean South America (although I have been thinking a lot about Panama and Costa Rica and love Belize with all my heart). Everything is in the earliest of stages for me, but my work is set to focus on the trickle down of national and international antiquities protection law to communities who actually come in contact with and, at times, manage, the ancient past.

http://traffickingculture.org/research/latin-american-antiquities/

A strong strain in all of this will be looking at comparative criminal markets/networks: what else is going on in these areas, how are those networks related or different, how are the perceived, how are they regulated (or not regulated) mostly just to see if anything is there. Sure, yes, in this part of the globe the obvious criminal network is cocaine. I see this as an interesting possibility as in Bolivia, coca production and consumption is tied up in deep cultural memories and very modern displays of political/social/cultural identity. But beyond this, my mind comes back to sorts of, how should I say it, institutionally/professionally sanctioned illicit markets and networks. Biological samples from living Amazonian groups? Medical/botanical Indigenous knowledge that wiggles its way into proprietary western pharmaceuticals?  I have a lot of ideas. I'm still working them out.

Fieldwork is going to happen and it will be in Bolivia first. I am currently looking for some sort of NGO to be my host institution without much luck, mostly because I need to move away from being associated with just archaeology and archaeologists. I don't think the host institution needs to do much to "host" me: I come with my own money and a book grant for the institution through the Fulbright, but sorting it out is new to me. Although I am open to suggestions, I think if I have to do initial fieldwork quite soon (sorting out the timeline), Copacabana might be the right place. A largely Indigenous community that manages major tourist archaeological sites but also might have thoughts on trans-lake movement of illicit/illegal goods (aha, you say, alternative criminal networks!). Also I have been to Copacabana. It seems doable. Email me with ideas folks!

More broadly, the project will have a website quite soon (Edit: See the Trafficking Culture website) and you will be able to find out more there. Until then I am very eager to get in touch with people who have ideas and opinions about all this. I know that there will, no doubt, be backlash from certain sectors but I sincerely hope that the various interest groups can come together on this one. I'm really interested in hearing from dealers and collectors, even if my work probably won't come very close to you all very often. As valid stakeholders in all this, your ideas and opinions matter. I suppose what I am saying is that I am not in this to pick fights, rather I am here to learn.

Hopefully this will be exciting and great. The people I am working with are truly amazing (and quite a lot of fun) and I can't imagine where I would rather be.

Sotheby's, 22 March, 1982: Pre-Columbian, Central American, North American Indian, Eskimo, Oceanic and African Works of Art

The anonymous collector was erroneously listed as Swedish.

Julio C. Tello, bringing context to Peru

As a component of getting back into the swing of things here in Glasgow, I have been revisiting old (and not so old) cases of Latin American looting, theft, and dubious antiquities-related things. As I slowly circle, preparing to descend upon the Sipán behemoth, I've taken small bites out of other Peruvian cases. In doing so I have had the joy of revisiting some of the world of certain "early" South American archaeologists. For better or for worse, I love the work of that period: it is so fresh (and innocent?) and the images from the time period have occupied hours of my life. I just keep clicking through and imagining.

Batán Grande

While working a bit on the intensive looting of the site of Batán Grande, I have had the pleasure of revisiting the work (and the imagery) of Julio C. Tello. In a series of  reports published in Lima's El Comercio newspaper in the 1930s, Tello actually documented looting damage at Batán Grande alongside the results of his archaeological work. Word is that the family that owned the Batán Grande land would not let him poke around there but he was able to conduct excavations on the edges. Intervention in the looting at the time was not an option: law or not, Peru's landowning families held all the cards at the time and could pretty much do what they pleased. This changed at Batán Grande during Peru's agrarian reform in the 1970s. The land was turned over to the campeseños who once worked for the original owners...and, as you can imagine, they looted the place too. That plus flash flooding and the entire river changing its course in the 1980s hasn't boded well for the site. Those Peruvian objects in your nearest ubermusem? They probably came from Batán Grande.

But how about Tello. He is who I am thinking about today. Born in 1880 into a Quechua speaking family, our man Tello would probably be considered Indigenous today. He called himself a "mountain Indian" which is so wonderfully badass in the mestizoizing climate of the day. His smarts got him out of the village, into University where he got a degree in medicine, and off to Harvard where he got a masters in anthropology in 1911 and eventually just, you know, founded internal (and external) Peruvian archaeology.

To nerd out a bit, Tello was the first person to conduct stratigraphic excavation in Peru. The Mesoamerica version of this event is something I wrote about for an ever-upcoming monograph that should be put out by the British Academy...sometime.

In Mesoamerica the first scientific aka. stratigraphic excavator seems to have been Raymond Merwin at the site of Holmul in Guatemala. Yours truly re-excavated a few of his pits there back in 2003, too young to realise what I was doing. Anyhow, as that upcoming paper argues, stratigraphic excavation is now seen and felt as the dawning of a new era of archaeology as science. Once it appears on the scene, we enter the era of "real" archaeology, at least in the minds of modern archaeologists. When we talk about issues of looting and loss of context, it is this very method of stratigraphic excavation that we have lost and all the information that comes with it. We have lost what makes archaeology archaeological. Stratigraphic excavation is definitional and Julio C. Tello is who brought it to Peru.

From the collection of the Peabody Museum,
this is Tello "diagramming his ideas" I think at Pachacamac.

Of course it is debatable if both Merwin and Tello were really the first in their respective geographic areas, but not really THAT debatable. No matter what, Tello's work at Paracas rules...and dare I say that the Paracas textiles that you and I can picture that ARE NOT looted probably were excavated by him.

Three cheers for context! Three cheers for Peruvian scholars! Three cheers for this blog post which was entirely a vehicle for me to post snazzy period photos of Julio Tello. I should buy that biography of him that is kicking about.

Want to hear about what is going on at Glasgow?

The folks over at Chasing Aphrodite have just posted an interview with Prof. Simon Mackenzie which you all should go and read because you and everyone is uber curious. Sure, they forgot to mention one member of the team in their list (the one researcher who is in the office on this bank holiday, I might add, eating a carrot and staring at Colombian objects in auction catalogues), but that is okay. I only just got here last Monday :)

"The Antiquities Trade as Organized Crime: Glasgow Team Digs Deep into the Market For Ancient Art"

Edit: That was quick! Thanks guys :)