From an archaeological perspective, the trade in illicit antiquities causes two problems. First, the unrecorded and unsystematic digging of archaeological sites and monuments to feed the trade reduces the total amount of information that is available about the past. Stratigraphies and contextual relationships are lost and fragile or unsaleable material is discarded or destroyed. Second, the recontextualization of looted objects in collections assigns them new meanings that are often flawed, and so any historical conclusions that are drawn from them are of uncertain reliability.
These problems are nothing new. As early as 1904, for example, Robert Carr Bosanquet, then director of the British School of Archaeology at Athens, recognized them in his discussion of the collection of the British antiquary, George Finlay. In the early 1870s, Finlay had obtained through the offices of an agent in Athens a large collection of obsidian artifacts that were said to be from various Bronze Age sites of southern and central Greece. Bosanquet discovered that instead they had probably all been dug out of the Bronze Age site of Phylakopi on the Greek Cycladic island of Melos. The site context of this material had been destroyed, an act which has hindered investigation there ever since, and the true provenance of the artifacts had been replaced by a series of fictitious ones designed to capture Finlay’s interest, and his money.
In 1993, David Gill and Christopher Chippindale encapsulated these problems in their memorable phrase, the ‘‘material and intellectual consequences of esteem’’. Like Bosanquet, Gill and Chippindale were looking at Early Bronze Age material from the Greek Cycladic islands, in their case the bleached-white marble figurines. When these Cycladic figurines first came to public attention in the nineteenth century they were considered to be ugly and barbaric, and of no value. Their aesthetic and monetary fortunes changed during the middle years of the twentieth century when their simple lines caused them to be viewed more positively as modernist archetypes, and they began to attract the attention of collectors and museums. Today, Cycladic figurines command high prices on the art market.
Gill and Chippindale considered the consequences of this newfound esteem. It was during the 1950s and 1960s that large numbers of Cycladic figurines began to appear on the international market. Out of the 1600 figurines so far known, about 90% have no ownership history or documented find spot, and so were presumably looted. Gill and Chippindale further estimated that the material consequence of obtaining so many figurines would be that something like 12 000 graves and their contents have been destroyed.
They also discussed the intellectual consequences. Like Finlay’s obsidian, the invention of vague and unverifiable provenances for the looted pieces, such as ‘‘said to be from Naxos’’, or wherever, plays havoc with any attempt to trace patterns of their original production and distribution. Furthermore, acceptance of the figurines within the modern canon as ‘art’ has brought with it all the trappings of connoisseurship, so that today, in trade and collecting circles at least, Cycladic figurines are considered to be works of fine art that were produced by so-called ‘master carvers’, and created by a society with both the means and the inclination to support full time artistic specialization and production. Yet, as Gill and Chippindale point out, these are propositions that need to be investigated, not assumed.
World History
