Author: Derek Fincham

Durham University Archaeology Society Conference 2012

I have been forwarded on a conference announcement for an upcoming event at Durham University. It looks to be a promising event.

Durham University Archaeology Society Conference 2012
Title: Whose Past? An Interdisciplinary debate on the repatriation of artefacts and reburial of human remains
When: Saturday April 28th 2012- 09:00-18:00

Where: Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Dawson Building, Durham University Science Site
Durham University Archaeology Society is to hold a one day interdisciplinary conference, to be held at Durham University involving the Archaeology, Anthropology, Philosophy and Law departments from Durham and Newcastle University and selected guest speakers. This year’s theme ‘Whose Past’ aims to generate a stimulating debate about the ownership and ethical principles associated with two types of archaeological material; artefacts and human remains, with the focus on the repatriation of artefacts and reburial of human remains.

The day will be divided into two sessions themed based first on Artefacts, then on Human Remains. Each session will follow the same format- where a debate question is set and the two guest speakers argue one in proposition and the other in opposition. Each session will contain a mixture of archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers and lawyers, who will provide their viewpoint, and then finally there is an open discussion for attendees to debate the theme and issues raised within the session. At the end of the day a conference conclusion debate will be held where conclusions will be drawn relating to the key themes and questions. In recent years the ethics and ownership of artefacts and human remains have entered the spotlight. The debate regarding the ownership of artefacts came under fire in the United Kingdom, due to the Crosby Garrett Helmet. The British museum is under increasing pressure to repatriate its most controversial artefacts including the Elgin Marbles, the Benin Bronzes, the Rosetta Stone and the Mold Gold Cape to name just a few.  The conference will explore issues raised relating to this example such as legislation relating to artefacts, repatriation, and stewardship/custodianship- should artefacts and human remains be kept for scientific research or given back to the indigenous community?

The repatriation of artefacts will be the key theme in the first session, with the debate question:  ‘Western
museums should take a sympathetic view to requests for the repatriation of cultural artefacts’. The repatriation of human remains has also been in the spotlight due to a number of recent cases including the repatriation of human remains from the Natural History Museum to the Torres Straits in March 2011, Namibian skulls from Germany in October 2011. The mummified Maori heads from France are expected to be repatriated in
January 2012 and back in 2006 British Museum repatriated human ashes back to Tasmania.

In August 2011, the druid King Arthur Pendragon had his case for the human remains found at Stonehenge, to be reburied immediately, rejected by the High Court. This legal case is the latest threat to burial archaeology including the legislative changes in 2008 which archaeologists argue is causing “severe damage to research and the advancement of knowledge”. The session will explore the issues including the treatment of the dead and reburial.

The debate question for the human remains session will be: ‘The recent legislative changes relating to human
remains are a threat to academic research’.

Jamie Davies
Durham University Archaeology Society Vice President
March 2012

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Cezanne Recovered in Serbia

Boy in the Red Vest, Cezanne

There are reports today that one of the works stolen from the Emil Buehrle Collection in Zurich has been recovered in Serbia. ARCA’s blog has a good rundown of the current press reports. The work was stolen in 2008 along with 3 others.

The BBC report notes:

Authorities have not named the painting, but local media have reported it is The Boy in the Red Vest, which was taken from Zurich’s Emil Buehrle Collection. Police said three people had been arrested in connection with the theft. It added an art expert was being flown in to confirm the authenticity of the 1888 painting, worth $109m (£68.3m).

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Report that Federal Agents will seize Khmer Statue from Sotheby’s

It looks like the attention drawn to Sotheby’s auction of this Koh Ker statue will result in Federal seizure of the statue:

Federal agents in New York on Wednesday moved to seize a thousand-year-old Cambodian statue from Sotheby’s, alleging in a civil complaint that Sotheby’s had put the 10th-century figure of a mythological warrior up for auction despite knowing that it had been stolen from a temple. Investigators said the sandstone statue, whose return is being sought by Cambodia and which is valued at $2 million to $3 million, would be impounded on Thursday by agents from the United States Department of Homeland Security. The statue, consigned to Sotheby’s for sale by a Belgian collector, had been set for auction in New York in March 2011 but was abruptly pulled from the market at the last minute after Cambodia claimed ownership. At the time Sotheby’s rejected Cambodia’s efforts to recover the Khmer antiquity, insisting there was no proof that it had been looted and therefore the auction was legal. But in a series of internal e-mail exchanges obtained by investigators and included in the federal complaint filed Wednesday in United States District Court in New York, at least one Sotheby’s officer is depicted as having been told in 2010 by a scholar in Cambodian art that Cambodian officials considered the statue a looted artifact.

With evidence that Sotheby’s was told the statue had been looted, the Federal agents have a powerful piece of evidence they did not have in the Ka Nefer Nefer case. I would expect the unnamed Belgian collector who put the statue up for consignment to consider relinquishing the statue quickly. If it was purchased in good faith, he or she has a good claim against the dealer they bought it from. How long new before the Norton Simon is pressured to return its version of the statue?

  1. Ralph Blumenthal & Tom Mashberg, Ancient Cambodian Statue Is Seized From Sotheby’s, The New York Times, April 4, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/arts/design/ancient-cambodian-statue-is-seized-from-sothebys.html (last visited Apr 4, 2012).

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

US Government’s Claim to Ka Nefer Nefer Mask Dismissed

The Ka Nefer Nefer Mask will be staying in St. Louis for now

The Ka Nefer Nefer mask, subject of two lawsuits in federal court, seems likely to stay in St. Louis for the near future. On Monday the U.S. District Court dismissed the U.S. Government’s forfeiture claim for the mask, as Rick St. Hilaire reported. The St. Luis Art Museum also has a parallel declaratory judgment action seeking to prevent the government from pursuing a forfeiture in the future.

You can generally read the tea leaves in the first few lines of a court opinion, and when the court wrote “the Government boldly states that it seeks the forfeiture of all rights, title and interest in a 3,200 year old Egyptian Mask . . .” you have a pretty good idea that the U.S. attorney was not able to convince the court to forfeit the mask. It most certainly was involved in a crime, yet the government was unable to allege enough “circumstances” surrounding the mask’s journey from Saqqara in Egypt in 1952 to the antiquities market some time later.

The government undercooked its legal analysis of the illegal activities giving rise to a forfeiture in its first forfeiture attempt here. For now it may amend its complaint. If it does, it should perhaps note that Egypt has laws establishing ownership of its antiquities, and there is no set of circumstances under which this mask could have rightfully left Egypt. Perhaps noting that may lead to a different result this time around.

The Government cannot simply rest on its laurels and believe that it can initiate a civil forfeiture proceeding on the basis of one bold assertion that because something went missing from one party in 1973 and turned up with another party in 1998, it was therefore stolen and/or imported or exported illegally.

The court was concerned that the government failed to establish precisely how the mask became stolen property. There is plenty of precedent on point for this legal principle, but the lawyers for the government failed to include enough of it in the complaint. Now the U.S. attorneys will have to return to the drawing board and establish a firmer legal framework for the illegal removal of the mask from Egypt. Making the government’s task more difficult, is the lack of evidence provided to them by Egypt establishing how and when the mask was stolen. As a consequence, if I was working on the case, I’d essentially treat it like an antiquities looting case. The theft itself is lost to history. But you don’t need those facts, just enough to put the  burden back on the museum’s case to show how far back its chain of title can go.

The museum will likely respond that it had no reason to believe the Aboutaam brothers were antiquities dealers to avoid in 1998. Was it established that they routinely dealt in looted objects in 1998, even if that can be established now? The SLAM conducted a search, and while certainly not ideal, it posed questions to officials in Egypt. For lots of background on the mask, see here.

We can ask whether the Museum should do the right thing, but the government attorneys had an opportunity to force them to and failed to allege enough concrete circumstances in its complaint to trigger what would have been a very uncomfortable forfeiture proceeding for the museum—one that coupled with reasonable public pressure exerted by Egypt would have certainly made continued possession of the mask in St. Louis untenable.

Lee Rosenbaum has posted a .pdf of the opinion:
  Ka-Nefer-Nefer Opinion

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Landis and Forgery at the University of Cincinatti

A forged work by Mark Landis

This is not your typical April 1 prank. Curators at the University of Cincinnati have put together a super show “Faux Real” examining Mark Landis, the man who has fooled many medium and small museums into accepting donations of his forged works.

Lisa Cornwell writing for the AP:

Landis creates works in oil, watercolor, pastels, chalk, ink and pencil, making most of his copies from museum or auction catalogs that provide dimensions and information on the originals. He sometimes bestows gifts under different names, such as the Father Arthur Scott alias used at Hilliard. In that case, he told officials that his dead mother had left works including Curran’s oil-on-wood painting “Three Women” and that he was donating it in her memory. . . . The Faux Real show will run through May 20 at the Dorothy W. and C. Lawson Reed Jr. Gallery. It depicts famous art forgers, details of how Landis made some donations and ways of detecting fakes. Visitors can view some works under ultraviolet light that causes sections to glow if they contain contemporary ingredients. Art experts say not accepting payment for his forgeries has helped keep Landis from being charged with a crime. Museum officials say forgeries can hurt their reputation and cost time and money researching suspected fraud.

He presents a challenge for prosecutors and the small museums he donates the works to. But the attention paid to him now will hopefully prevent future museums from accepting more forgeries. The exhibition will run through May. ARCA offered advice with respect to the possible ways the law regulates (or to be more accurate has difficulty regulating) these forgeries and donations.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Accounts of Looting at El-Hibeh in Egypt

“Looting is ongoing, there is no protection for the site”
 -Carol Redmount, archaeologist

Marco Werman of PRI talks with archaeologist Carol Redmount about ongoing looting at El-Hibeh in Egypt. In the interview which is embedded below Redmount notes that a criminal enterprise which has “mafia-like” characteristics is systematically looting the site. The leader of the operation is allegedly an escaped prisoner. No security is protecting the site.

I recommend clicking through to see a slideshow of discarded human remains and looted graves. Site protection is the first and probably most important step which can be taken here. Protections at Egypt’s points of export and importing checkpoints cannot undo the damage being done here. The looters themselves are motivated by a vulnerable resource and economic hardship. You can follow this site on a facebook site Redmount has created to track the situation and offer assistance.

The facebook page notes a first-hand account from Redmount:

When I returned to Cairo from our dig house last week and our van passed the site heading for the eastern desert highway, we saw about ten men openly looting the mound and desert behind (we have pictures of some of them), with conveniently parked motorcycles nearby. One of our drivers took the same road this past Friday and reported that again numerous men were busy with wholesale looting of the site in broad daylight. This is an on-going crisis. They are destroying the site. The SCA officials have tried everything they could to get the looting to stop. Nothing seems to be having any effect. This is something police and security seem to be ignoring, turning a blind eye to, or worse. We started the Save Hibeh facebook page because we are at our wits end as to what else to do . . .

The solution is for Egypt’s authorities to raise the level of security at this site and sites like it, or to enlist the assistance of other agencies from UNESCO or Italy’s Carabinieri. We can all collectively pressure Egypt from afar to take these steps, but a nation controls the protection of its own heritage.

Our next-best option is to stop buying the shabtis and kinds of salable objects that come from sites like this without complete histories, adequately documented.

  1. Andrea Crossan, Egypt Looters Ransack Archaeological Sites PRI’s The World (2012), http://www.theworld.org/2012/03/egypt-looters-ransack-sites/ (last visited Mar 28, 2012).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Connecting Art and Drug Crime

LS Lowry’s The Viaduct, stolen in 2007

We can make at least one more connection between the drug trade and art theft. A number of stolen artworks have been recovered near Manchester. The investigation was primarily aimed at the sale of illegal narcotics, the paintings were ancillary to that investigation. The theft of the paintings in 2007 was a troubling example of a violent art theft:

A man posing as a postman knocked on the Aird family’s door in Cheadle Hulme. When Louise Aird, who was carrying the couple’s two-year-old daughter Sabrina in her arms, opened the door, she was confronted by Miller brandishing a 10-inch knife. Three other men followed him into the house. “They tied me up with a cable and had a knife in my back,” Aird, 46, said. “They said they would slit my throat. Then they said they would kill the baby if we moved, that’s what they kept saying. They took everything out of the bottom half of the house.”

The four men stole 14 pieces of art. In 2009 one of the thieves was jailed, while three remain at large. The two arrests in connection with this drug raid do not appear to have a connection to the theft itself. Rather the arrested men acquired the paintings through the black market. Though these works are well known and could not have been sold on the open market, these paintings do have value on the black market as leverage. The connections between other criminal activity and art theft are often discussed, but seldom shown in such sharp contrast as we see in this case. Interesting that the defendants thought the police were investigating them for the art, when it was a drug investigation instead that led to the recovery.
  1. Victim of LS Lowry paintings robbery relieved after thieves jailed, the Guardian, March 22, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/mar/22/ls-lowry-paintings-robbery (last visited Mar 22, 2012).
  2. LS Lowry Masterpieces Found In Anti-Drugs Raid In Liverpool, The Huffington Post,  http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/21/ls-lowry-masterpieces-worth-17m-found-liverpool-anti-drugs-raid_n_1370727.html (last visited Mar 22, 2012).
Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Cultural Justice

Houston’s Fourth Ward/Freedmen’s Town

I have posted on SSRN a working paper “Justice and the Cultural Heritage Movement: Using Environmental Justice to Appraise Art and Antiquities Disputes” which attempts to make connections between the environment and culture.

The piece introduces the concept of cultural justice. It uses the recent scholarship examining environmental justice to apply critical scrutiny to the calls for repatriation of cultural heritage (including art and antiquities). The paper applies Rawls’s theory of justice to cultural heritage and presents a taxonomy of cultural justice examining in detail the distributive, procedural, corrective and social aspects.

The environmental justice movement has been an important grassroots effort which allows minority and underpriviliged communities to challenge environmental harms. It has its roots in Houston. I use as a starting point the cultural harm which has taken place here in Houston to a neighborhood called the Fourth Ward, at one time referred to as the “Harlem of the South”, which has fallen victim to cultural loss and over-development. In the piece I work to make broader observations about culture, the environment, and justice, focusing specifically on antiquities law and policy. It is my hope that by using justice we can begin to move beyond the source/market entrenchment and craft real solutions. I would of course welcome any comments or criticisms (derek.fincham ‘at’ gmail.com).

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Realkulturpolitik: Turkey Requests 18 Objects from the Met

One of the contested objects, a Hittite silver cup (1400 BCE)

Jason Felch reports on the Chasing Aphrodite blog that Turkey is actively seeking 18 objects from the Met. Earlier this month Martin Bailey reported that Turkey would stop lending objects to the United States and United Kingdom, and this dispute with the Met may be one of the motivators for that cultural embargo. This seems a curious collection of objects for return, one that does not share many characteristics with the other kinds of objects requested by nations of origin in recent years. The objects were part of the Norbert Schimmel Collection. Schimmel was a former Met trustee and the collection itself was published in a 1974 volume edited by none other than outspoken looting critic Oscar White Muscarella.

I sometimes call these kinds of requests for return realkulturpolitik, in that there does not appear to be a direct legal mechanism for the return of these objects at this late date. In order to pursue a legal claim here Turkey would have to justify its reasons for not bringing a claim in 1974. Reasons for that delay may be new evidence  which has come to light which shows that these objects were illegally removed from their context or from Turkey. Yet we do not yet know of any of the specifics justifying the return. And if a legal claim was brought for these objects, Turkey would have to show the Met is not prejudiced by the delay under a laches defense. This could prove difficult. After all, Schimmel and others who would have acquired these objects are deceased and cannot provide evidence about how these objects were acquired.

And from the Met’s perspective, we do not yet have any of the histories of these objects before their acquisition by Schimmel. The absence of detailed information foreclosing their potential looting or acquisition of these objects makes them questionable objects perhaps, but does not give Turkey a legal right to them. The law requires Turkey to establish that they came from Turkey, which might be difficult. Schimmel appears to have acquired these objects before 1974, at a time when the heritage community was first beginning to pay attention to the looting of sites, after the 1970 UNESCO Convention.

What Turkey does have though is a potential ethical claim which the Met may respond to. And if the Met does not, Turkey is imposing a damaging cultural embargo, and pressure will likely mount on the Met to justify their continued possession of these objects.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com