Month: February 2010

Footnotes 2/2/2010

  • UNESCO wisely calls for a ban in the trade of Haitian artifacts to prevent looting.
  • A Korean civic group will appeal a French Court’s decision holding looted Korean royal texts to be French public material because they have been in France for over 140 years.
  • Over 3,000 people have signed a petition to cease the break up of a musical instrument collection at the V&A Museum in London.
  • Funding for the Arts will hold steady under Obama’s budget.
  • The FBI has paid Ted Gardiner, the Utah antiquities dealer and undercover operative in a federal bust of artifact trading, a total of $224,000 for his cooperation in the investigation.
  • The Egyptian Parliament amended Egypt’s antiquities law, which forbids trade in antiquities but allows possession of antiquities with some individuals.
  • Seven people, including a pastor, were held in Chennai, India for smuggling antique idols.
  • According to Noah Charney, stolen art is the 3rd most illegally trafficked item after drugs and guns, and is used by organized criminals for bargaining.
  • Author of Among Thieves, David Hosp is interviewed and discusses what being an art thief must be like.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Cultural Heritage Preservation Internships in Peru

I get dozens of requests every month from students and arts professionals wondering what career opportunities exist for the protection or preservation of cultural heritage.  There are not yet all that many opportunities, but that is changing.   

Here is one cultural internship program created to support the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Peru and the United States.  It looks like there are nine positions, and applicants should have an arts background and Spanish fluency:

 

In support of the MOU, the Embassy promotes an internship program for American graduate students of museum studies and conservation programs to be held from July through August 2010.The objective of this program is to enable well-qualified graduate students the opportunity to do field research in Lima, Arequipa and Lambayeque. It will also support museums that house rich art collections, but are greatly in need of skilled professionals.  These internships will provide an excellent opportunity for Peruvian and American colleagues to exchange ideas on new techniques related to conservation, marketing, and exhibition planning, with long-term possibilities for collaboration. Please find more information here.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Piecing Together the Origin of Ancient Gold

Interesting story on some ancient gold jewelry currently held by the University of Pennsylvania.  Twenty of the gold objects are on display at the Bowers Museum.  The Bowers website touts these objects as Trojan gold excavated by Heinrich Schliemann.  However the history of the objects is unknown: 

George Allen of Hesperia Art, a few blocks from Rittenhouse Square, approached the museum with a rare opportunity: the chance to purchase 24 gold pieces that he said were from ancient Troy.
Allen had no evidence to back up his claim that the gold was of Trojan origin, other than what the museum’s curators could see with their own eyes. The earrings and other baubles were in the same style as the famous objects found by Schliemann.

The pieces were so similar that initially the curators thought they might be from the Schliemann collection – which was still missing, its loss mourned by art historians worldwide.

In addition, the objects for sale bore tantalizing similarities to golden artifacts from another ancient stronghold: the royal Mesopotamian city of Ur, in what is now Iraq. Scholars already had theorized the existence of a trade network between the two civilizations. The new items, though they lacked a paper trail, seemed to support that theory.

“The purchase of this collection is urgently recommended,” Penn curator Rodney Young wrote in a March 1966 memo to the museum’s board.

Young also acknowledged that the items had an unsavory aspect, probably having been “looted by peasants and dealers.”

Museum officials decided to buy the pieces, for $10,000. But evidently they had misgivings.
Four years later, in 1970, the museum announced it would no longer acquire undocumented objects, arguing that such acquisitions encouraged the “wholesale destruction of archaeological sites.”

  1. Tom Avril, Tracing ancient roots of Penn Museum’s gold, PHILADELPHIA ENQ., January 31, 2010.
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com