Introducing the Trafficking Culture Website

Finally, finally I get to show you folks the website for the University of Glasgow's Trafficking Culture project! Direct your browsers to:

http://traffickingculture.org

I think the real gem of the whole thing is the Encyclopedia, which is meant to provide brief overviews of interesting case studies, but our Publications section is useful (download those PDFs people), and of course, you can find out about me and what I am up to.

Remember this is a work in progress...very very very in progress. It is a strong start to something that we hope will grow, both in obvious ways (expanding the Encyclopedia, adding more hosted Publications by people not specifically IN the project) and not so obvious ways. Each of our individual research foci will be expanded upon, contain period project updates, and will eventually incorporate multimedia elements and so on. We will be hosting and presenting all sorts of data (we hope). 

Also, the site might expand in ways we can't even imagine. The sky is the limit. Suffice to say it is a fair go and I think it is a good starting point. I'm proud of it! 

What do you all think?

More on pouches, pots, and my skewed perceptions

The pot (detail);
Things don't bode well for the captive. Pierced head?!

Thinking more about yesterday's Wari pouch post, I asked on of my fearless leaders essentially the question I asked here: why is there a fight now over the Cleveland Museum's acquisition of a Roman head and a Maya pot when they bought a Wari pouch from Sotheby's last year that seems to have just as transparent a provenance, at least as published. He said that he felt that Paul Barford's recent blog post had a very good point, that the ruckus was about the Roman head and that the Maya pot was along for the ride.

I admit, I missed that part of Mr Barford's post (I usually read the blogs through bleary morningeyes, my glasses misted up from a cup of coffee). He writes:

Is the origin of the Mayan pot somehow less important than the Phrygian marble, that we are all (myself included) hammering on about one and not the other? 

This is where my own skewed perceptions come in...and also shows how lightly I was following things. I didn't know everyone was focusing on the head. I think the head is kind of boring and 'samey'... The Maya pot, however, is spectacular, unique and filled with the amazing Maya-ness that convinced me to abandon a childish interest in ancient Egypt and and head off to a tent in the deep jungle. It is Maya pottery that tests my limits; it exposes my hypocrisy. I argue here and there against publishing unprovenienced material, yet I consume Justin Kerr's maya pot database like a true junky. I think everyone out there has a 'If I got a tattoo it would be...", well mine is on an unprovenienced Maya pot. Does that count as publication? I can honestly stare at a particularly detailed codex style pot, perhaps, for a long time. I try to project the scenes on to the jungle sites that I've spent time in. I try to make it come alive.

Reconstruction drawing of Xultun mural
by Dr Heather Hurst; LOVE IT!

I am a lady who spent much of yesterday just looking at and thinking about the Xultun murals. I emailed Dr. Heather Hurst to see if she sells prints of her paintings of them...I am probably Hurst's biggest fan and she does't even know it. Her reconstruction paintings of the San Bartolo murals make my heart flutter...

I could gush about the different face paint patterns on the figures, the body modification (does that one dude have a pierced head?!); the hair styles. I could drift off in to trying to understand the complicated Maya idea of captive taking and 'war'. Apparently the pot is tied to the site of Nibaj; there isn't an emblem glyph that I can see but there appears to have been some sort of analysis done on a pot in the British Museum which portrays another stage in this sequence of events. I don't know anything about Nibaj! I feel my distraction for the weekend coming on.

The MFA's Classical Gallery from the Boston Globe;
This place is a snooze and a half.

The Roman head, however, seems like kind of a yawn to me. Confession time: I get really quite bored in big, traditional museums. I have fallen asleep inside a gallery of the Fitzwilliam...on two occasions (this from a lady who is unable to nap). At the MFA I head straight to their collection of Copley portraits (in context in Boston!! I *love* 17th and 18th century portraits); I only dip into the Classical Galleries if there is a particular row going on about a piece. I don't read the signage in those museums, I rarely linger, and I tend to wonder if there is something else I could be doing with my time. 

That isn't to say that I don't like museums*, but I think that style of museum is tired and has outlived its usefulness. Yawn. Sleepy time. Heads like that one, at least when they end up in a traditional museum, represent all that is boring with the museum experience to me. They will stick it on a pillar, out of context, and I or someone like me will walk by it and not care.  Using the MFA as an obvious example, their Roman, Greek and Egyptian galleries have the feel of a tired Junior High School that was built in the 1970s and never updated...the the same washed out colour scheme and sense of resigned dispair. To me, all the Roman heads blur together. Yes, this is ironic since I love portait painting so much, but consider it a fault of traditional museum display rather than the portrait heads themselves. I just can't stay awake. Just ask my long-suffering, non archaeologist partner: I am always way ahead of him in this type of museum saying 'come ON! HURRY UP!'.

But, as it turns out, that is just me! The news story is about the head and not the vase! And that is pretty much what Neil said: the pouch isn't any different, it just isn't Greece/Rome/Egypt. Well heck!

* What kind of museums do I like? Well the first that springs to mind is the Museo de la Cultura Maya in Chetumal. I haven't been there since 2003 so maybe it is terrible now, but I went, what, twice? Three times? While I was living in Belize. That is a lot since I didn't have a vehicle and Chetumal is in another country. I don't even know if that museum had any artefacts in it. Probably yes, but they were local and legal of course and they took a back seat. I felt that the museum really portrayed how I felt about the the ancient Maya. The feeling that brought me to Central America, to that horrible tent in the jungle, was there. 

The whole place was organised around a version of the Maya world tree, a swirling red ceiba in the style of the one on Pakal's sarcophagus lid. It connected all floors of the museum: the roots being in a strangle little Xibulba filled with tiny gods of the underworld lurking among the roots; the middle where you experienced the Maya on earth such models of Maya cities that you walked over on glass; the branches where you learned about Maya writing, the calendar and religion. There was a reconstruction of a round Maya house for kids to pop into outside...and the place was air conditioned! Yes!

But wait everyone, there are other antiquities on the Cleveland Museum website!

Lately the interwebs have been abuzz with news of the Cleveland Museum acquiring a Roman portrait head and a Maya pot which do not have solid pre-1970 provenances. To me, these scandals all swirl together to form a big mess and, besides, I tend to think in terms of legislation and legal ownership claims when I worry about provenance dates (sorry team, if it left Bolivia after 1906 you can't make me feel that it is legal; illicit is a fine enough term). I've been halfway looking at this one because the Maya vessel in question reeks of the November Collection era of import and was published in the same book as the Grolier Codex (Coe's The Maya Scribe and his World, 1973, first time we saw that sucker!), a book that I leafed through a few months back for an article that will be on our Trafficking Culture website come next week.

This morning I thought I would take a peek at the Cleveland Museum website to see how they were talking about the vase and I was surprised to recognize quite a few of the South and Central American antiquities among their recent acquisitions! I don't monitor museum acquisitions closely, maybe I should, but these pieces have been passing through Sotheby's and recently. I guess that answers the question I always have looking at Sotheby's catalogues: 'Who buys this stuff?!'

The piece that leapt out at me was a Wari pouch made of hide and human hair. It was offered for sale as lot 108 in the 13 May 2011 African, Oceanic and Pre-Columbian Art Sale (N08749). I remember looking at it and thinking 'Well that is weird, could it be a fake?' and then thinking "I guess you can sell human hair but where do you draw the line? Which body bits can you sell and which are illegal?" Either way the pouch stuck in my mind...and there it is in Cleveland. They bought it for $146,500 and it isn't even on display.

Now here is a sincere question. Why isn't anyone mad about the pouch?

Cleveland offers nothing about the provenance of the pouch on their website. In the Sotheby's Catalogue, the following information is offered:

PROVENANCE
Alan Lapiner
Acquired from the above in 1964 or 1965
LITERATURE
Alan Lapiner, Pre-Columbian Art of South America, New York, 1976, colorplate 572

See, to me that is a solid surface date of 1976 with an unsuitable hypothetical provenance of  '1964 or 1965'. The scenario described is roughly 'I bought this in some year, I forget which, but it was before 1970, from someone who is dead, and I don't have paperwork on that since I don't know the exact year, and I waited over a decade to publish this special thing'. To me that seems as iffy a provenance as exists for the portrait head and the Maya vase. Why didn't anyone cause a row over the Wari pouch?

Yes, perhaps there is information that both Sotheby's and the Cleveland Museum are holding back on the pouch. Perhaps the former owner regularly posed for photos with while holding newspapers from the 1960s or something. Maybe that is it. But barring that, what makes this provenance any more solid than the provenance of the two recent acquisitions?

This really is a silly question, I don't even know why I am asking it. I am more just interested in seeing the pouch turn up again. I've spent so much time with piles of South American auction catalogues that I have reached a point where I see the sale of the objects as the end of the road. I feel like once they leave the block they fly off into the abyss never to be seen again. The catalogue is my last look...where I can imagine what might have been. In a way that is almost better than seeing an object turn up in the collection of a museum that appears to have absolutely no sense of acquisitional reality. Did y'all really need that head and pot? Really? Was it worth the bad press?

But in typing that, I wonder if they truly didn't anticipate the bad press. I mean, heck, they bought that pouch and no one said anything.