Last night I was working on
a short definition of the term "huaquero". This is a seemingly easy task. The shortest definition is, of course is "Quechua/South American Spanish for looter of archaeological sites", but I think the origins of the term are interesting enough to warrant mention. Not here though: you all will have to wait on that.
Moving on from origins, I started thinking about the tone of the word. When translated into English the term "grave robber" is often used. "Looter" is too general since it pertains specifically to looting of ancient cultural objects, but I wonder, at least at some level, if "grave robber" isn't quite right either. These days the term "huaquero" in newspapers and by academics is almost totally negative in the "grave robber" sense. Across the board bad press. However, there seems to be a very strong and not entirely negative folk mythology about huaqueros that I am finding really hard to capture in translation.
For the past century and before huaqueros were just a social reality on Peru's north coast. Good or bad, looting was profitable when nothing else was and thus it was something people did. I think this has caused a sort of gritty romantic image of the huaquero in the public conciousness. I will go out on a limb and assert that the term itself might just create a complete image of a person in Peruvian minds with clear ideas of race, culture, and class. Basically, I wonder if, at least historically, "huaquero" brings up the image of an
iconic, stereotypical cholo from the North Coast.
This odd romance is, perhaps, best demonstrated in the song El Huaquero by Miguel Paz, a
marinera norteña which seems to date from around or before the 1940s(???)
My translation of the lyrics:
I am the old grave robber (huaquero)
and I have come to loot pottery (huacos)
from the highest ancient mound (huaca)
to the lowest to the lowest ancient mound (huaca)
I had a cholia (female cholo in this context)
Who was called Jacoba
And every night
The Barbacoba bird called
Huaquero huaquero
Huaquero, were are going to loot (verb: huaquear)
Coba coba coba at dawn
Coba coba coba at dusk
Did I just totally blow your mind out of the water? Well brace yourselves for this: El Huaquero as performed by Peruvian kindergardeners:
YES! The little boy playing The Huaquero Viejo is holding a "looted" ceramic vessel!!
Now, I don't know about your kindergarden experience, but I was never taught to sing songs about grave robbing, except in a freak-the-kids-out-at-Halloween context. Grave robbing wasn't something to happily dance about.
All in all, I really don't think we have a good translation of "huaquero". Yes it gets more pejorative as time passes, but will it ever totally lose this cultural context? I hope not. We don't want to forget the creation of a western market for these objects and the resulting free-for-all that brought people on the North Coast to, well, grave rob to such an extent that kindergardeners now sing about it. Yes make the term negative now, but don't lose the historical scope.
If anyone has any good references on the social and cultural use of the term "huaquero" in either Spanish or English, send them to me!
One particularly annoying aspect of poring over images of illicit antiquities all day is that so many of them are just so gosh-darn cool looking. I don't even pretend that the shapes are not appealing, they really are.I just wish they were available to me to use...for whatever. The images are clearly not reproducible for copyright reasons. And then there is the ethical abyss one falls into when it comes to the use of looted material for anything that approaches scholarship. Yet I can't let the bits and pieces that strike my fancy go.
I think I have come up with a serviceable work around. Here and there, every now and again, I am vectorising an object that I like. Using the auction photograph as a model, I am remaking iconography that is interesting, changing it *just* enough, and stripping it of any sort of ownership attribution. This process is quite cathartic. I want to say that is because I feel like I am reclaiming what is lost but that would be a lie. It is cathartic because I like precise, focused work (hey, it is just who I am) and making these things are fun.
I really can only conclude that the people searching the web are people
who are actively trying to buy and sell this stuff. This means that
there is a good chance such people are going to stumble upon our site
and I wonder if we should be thinking about how we appear to them. Maybe
it shouldn't matter at all, but the person who searched "unreliable
fake antiquities dealers" has a story to tell that I would love to
hear...somehow. Also there feels like there is some sort of opportunity
to evangelize without being mean... almost a FAQ page for potential
buyers and sellers where one takes them through the gravity and risk of
it all. Nothing pushy, of course, I hate pushy, but just a decent amount of useful information for people who are contemplating getting into that scene from someone who doesn't want their money.
I'm thinking specifically of a huge insert that I recently saw
in the New York Observer: a multipage booklet from a dealer/auctioneer
yammering on about how it is a great time to invest in buying
antiquities. Despite what I feel emotionally (buying looted objects = bad!), objectively it is a really
crap time to invest in antiquities and anyone who tells someone
otherwise is a liar. Sure, in the past you could make bank off of antiquities, but they are just a poor investment, especially for small timers. Check the news: court cases out the wazoo, countries demanding returns, increasing law and regulation, television shows that make out US-based looters to be total trash, evidence that the bubble of the larger art market is deflating... It just isn't a good place for one's money.
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