Symposium on Repatriation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Objects

 

In October, the DePaul University College of Law Center for Art, Museum & Cultural Heritage Law will sponsor a symposium to address the underlying legal, ethical and moral reasons and policies behind the repatriation of archaeological and ethnographic objects.

Repatriation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Objects

In recent years, countries of origin have successfully recovered illegally removed archaeological and ethnographic objects. Indigenous and Native American communities also have successfully recovered cultural artifacts excavated from ancient burial sites. Such recoveries are the result of a patchwork of legal rules, treaties and extra-legal pressure placed on the current possessor. The museum community and some market participants now accept that archaeological objects unprovenanced before 1970 should not be acquired without proof of legal export. However, countries of origin have recently sought to move beyond the “1970 rule” and are requesting the repatriation of objects appropriated during earlier times as a part of imperialism, colonialism, or armed conflict. The underlying bases supporting repatriation in such cases are often unclear, and the validity of these repatriation claims is hotly debated.


Well-known examples of historical claims include Nigeria's request for repatriation of the Benin bronzes that British troops removed during the 1897 "Punitive Expedition"; China's efforts to seek the return of bronze animal heads, once part of the zodiac fountain clock in the Yuanming Yuan garden of the Old Summer Palace that French and English troops looted and burned in 1860, and the recent move by Turkey to recover antiquities taken before 1970, including the Zeugma mosaic. U.S. indigenous communities have recovered cultural artifacts within the legal structure of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), but some claims and museums have acted outside of NAGPRA as well. Finally, the symposium will address the tensions that arise when a fiduciary duty arguably conflicts with a perceived legal or moral obligation to return a cultural object. 

The symposium will bring together lawyers, museum professionals, representatives of indigenous communities, and other scholars and experts in the field. Participants will discuss the repatriation of cultural objects appropriated in the more distant past whose restitution some view as outside the scope of existing law, but others view as a matter of restitutionary justice. They also will address the repatriation of artifacts looted in recent times whose removal is often viewed as causing contemporary damage to the cultural heritage of communities and nations and to the historical and archaeological record.

Spiegel on Russia's War Trophy Art

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Martin Doerry and Matthias Schlepp recently conducted an interview with Irina Alexandrovna, director of the Pushkin Museum  in Moscow. A translation by Christopher Sultan was published by Spiegel International online. Next to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, the century-old museum is considered to hold the most important collection of foreign art in Russia. Its collection includes 670,000 paintings, sculptures and archaeological artefacts. The interview with the 90-year-old Irina Antonova  begins by touching upon a variety of subjects, mainly reflecting the west's fascination and prejudices against demonized "communists". It however dwells on the issue of  art taken from Germany in 1945 and retained in Russian Museums:

a historical burden continue[s] to tarnish German-Russian relations -- despite the fact that the Soviet Union had collapsed in 1991 and the Cold War was part of the past.To this day, looted German art -- known as "trophy art" in Moscow -- lies in the vaults of Russian museums. Promises to reach mutually acceptable solutions to the problem have never been kept.The different terms that the two countries use for the art treasures in question are revealing. Berlin views the works of art carried off by the Red Army after the end of World War II, on Stalin's orders, as stolen and is demanding their return. Moscow sees them as moral compensation for the atrocities that Germans committed during the war. Russia's "Extraordinary State Commission to Examine and Investigate German-Fascist Crimes Committed by the Invaders and their Accomplices on Soviet Territory" had listed 427 Soviet museums and 4,000 libraries that fell victim to the Germans. According to the commission, more than 110 million books and publications were destroyed. In February 1997, the State Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, which was controlled by a majority of communists and nationalists at the time, declared the disputed artworks from Germany to be the permanent property of Russia.
[...] According to the Russian Ministry of Culture, less than 10 percent of the art brought from Germany is still in Russia. Between 1955 and 1960, the Soviet Union returned 1.5 million museum artifacts to communist-ruled East Germany, including 1,240 works from the Old Masters Gallery in Dresden, 16,000 graphic works and more than 100,000 coins. The famous Pergamon Altar was also returned to Germany at the time, as was the "Green Vault," the treasure chamber of the Elector of Saxony. Since 1996, the permanent collection at Moscow's Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts has included "Priam's Treasure," which the German businessman and amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann discovered in Troy in 1873 and brought home to Germany. The museum's vaults also contain the gold of the Merovingians and the so-called Treasure of Eberswalde.
[...]
Antonova: [...]  the generation of Germans alive today isn't responsible for Hitler and the invasion of the Soviet Union. But, to be entirely clear, the issue of trophy art is primarily one of an ethical nature. It has to do with moral and not so much financial compensation for Russia. One cannot simply invade a country, destroy its museums and try to stamp out the roots of its culture, as the Germans did. This is a historic lesson for the entire world. After the end of the war, I went to Leningrad and the Peterhof Palace. Everything had been reduced to ruins.

SPIEGEL: International law and the Hague Convention of 1907 prohibit the theft of art.

Antonova: The Hague Convention is outdated because the nature of wars has changed. Nowadays, mankind needs a different mechanism, at an international level, to protect the world's cultural heritage. For a new convention, it would be sufficient to agree on one sentence: A country is liable, with its own cultural treasures, for the damage it inflicts on the cultural heritage of another nation. Then no one will drop bombs on the Louvre, the Prado in Madrid or the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. I have proposed going to The Hague with this initiative. If they allow me to speak, I'll be happy to make an appearance there.

SPIEGEL: Article 16 of the 1990 German-Russian Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany obligates both sides to return looted art. Why has this yet to happen?

Antonova: As far as I can remember, the treaty doesn't contain such an obligation. Everything it says relates to works of art that were removed illegally rather than in conjunction with war.

Trophy-Mining Ancient Monuments in Turkey

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John Leonard ('The looting of Sardis', Athens News 24 May 2012) discusses the background to the removal of a shipload of artefacts from ancient Sardis, in western Asia Minor by American excavators in 1921-1922. According to Leonard, the action was:

symptomatic of a larger trend in which rapacious European and American individuals and institutions sought to take advantage of the late 19th- and early 20th-century decline of the Ottoman Empire to enrich private collections and national museums. Prominent among those figures advocating the removal of Greco-Roman and other antiquities from Ottoman lands were two Princeton professors, Howard Crosby Butler, Sardis’ first excavator, and Edward Capps, chair of the managing committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA)".

Archaeologist Fikret Yegul, discussed these events in a 2010 article, and:

The question that seems to lie at the heart of the looting of Anatolian archaeological sites in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to Yegul, is whether the moribund Ottoman Empire had any right to the rich cultural heritage that lay within its boundaries. “To cast the followers of Mohammed,” Yegul writes, “in the role of caretakers of classical culture - a culture all European nation states claimed as their own, with similar noises coming from across the [Atlantic] - was an anathema.” Indeed, the Ottomans’ “exotic” eastern empire “was seen as an illegitimate and barbaric power, especially as concerned dominion over the Greco-Roman heritage of Western Anatolia and Christian Jerusalem”. 

One might note that nothing much seems to have altered, American collectors and dealers still today voice such opinions in justification of their own no-questions-asked dealings with dugup artefacts from other people's territories. Leonard considers though that these artefact hunters: "may simply have been exploiting the Ottomans’ laxity, systemic corruption or current political troubles as an opportunity to benefit themselves, their employers or their favourite museums". There had been a long history of the mining of sites in Anatolia for displayable trophies for western museums:

The Ottomans’ revised antiquities law of 1884, which prohibited all cultural materials from leaving the country, had been a reaction to a host of past offences committed on a grand scale across western Asia Minor. As early as 1841 the English traveller Charles Fellows had shipped an entire Classical temple-tomb, the Nereid Monument from the southwestern town Xanthos, to the British Museum. Briton Charles Newton plundered the decorative sculpture of the 4th century BC Mausoleum of Halicarnassus for the same museum in the 1850s. Shortly after, in 1863, John Wood, an English engineer, removed whatever he could find of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, leaving only a gaping hole. Then, in the 1870s, Carl Humann spirited away to Berlin the bulky, intricately carved remains of the Hellenistic Altar of Zeus at Pergamon. The passage of the 1884 Ottoman antiquities law was perceived as a bothersome development by foreign excavators and collectors, but it did not stop them from continuing to export their archaeological discoveries. They simply found ways to circumvent the law, even - like David Hogarth at Priene in 1905 - appearing surprised that the new regulations applied to them. Exportations carried on, with Theodor Wiegand, director of the German Archaeological Institute at Istanbul, removing the entire Agora Gate at Miletus in 1908. The Austrians, too, led by Otto Bendorf, in the years 1896-1906, packed off to Vienna nearly everything they unearthed at Ephesus. 

 Excavations by foreign missions in the region were brought to a halt by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, but when it ended, the digging gradually resumed, as did illegal exportation. According to Leonard, finds were taken to American museums from the Harvard University excavations at Colophon and Sardis in 1922. From the latter site the removed artefacts were enough to fill 56 crates ("enough to fill three railroad cars").

Upon learning of the clandestine shipment, the cultural authorities of the newly established Republic of Turkey immediately stopped the Americans’ excavation permit for Sardis and for all other Anatolian sites. A diplomatic resolution was finally reached after 53 of the original crates - including the 30 gold coins and 122 silver coins - were shipped back to Turkey in 1924, where they were inspected and divided up. Ultimately, 12 crates containing various artefacts and four gold coins arrived back in New York by the end of August 1925 - a “gift” from Turkey.

Thus ended "an era when Anatolian antiquities were regularly used by both Turks and foreigners as currency with which one could purchase fame, professional success and political favour". The antiquities authorities of the new Turkish state struggled to compensate for centuries of Ottoman neglect of the region’s cultural heritage, between 1923 and 1926 they built seven new archaeological museums. 

Queen-Mother 'Oo?

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"Ya what?"
"Who?"
"Nah!"
are probably the three most common answers you'd get from people exiting the British Museum to the simple question posed by Kwame Opoku's most recent article on the topic of the Benin loot kept there ('Do They Know Queen-Mother Idia?' May 27th 2012).

A recent visit to the British Museum confirmed what we have observed in previous years: many Western visitors to the museum have no specific interest in any particular Benin object, even if they visit the Sainsbury Gallery and look at the Benin Bronzes. They are mostly unaware of the looted Queen-Mother-Idia(“Iyoba”) ivory mask. Have the hundred years of illegal retention of this mask had any effect on the knowledge and interest of the average Western visitor to the museum? It seems hardly any European visitor is even aware that the mask represents an important personality in Benin history. Most Western visitors are certainly unaware of her important and decisive role and influence in stabilizing the Kingdom of Benin during the civil war at the end of the 15th Century, a crucial period in Benin history. 

He goes on:

Contrary to the propaganda of the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums, Benin culture has not become part of European heritage and culture even though Benin artefacts have been [...] detained in Western museums for more than hundred years. [...]  Queen-Mother Idia clearly plays no role in the culture, imagination and thinking of Westerners. So why keep her captive in London when she would be a subject of veneration and reverence in her homeland Benin, Nigeria? Why do the British Museum and the British Government still insist on keeping in Britain cultural artefacts of others, against the will of the owners? So far, we have not come across any reasonable justification for such an attitude.

 Opoku concludes that the only real reason that the Brits hang on to stuff like this is to cling to the relics of their own imperial 'glory'. Meanwhile another part of the Post-Enlightenment British Museum:

 Greek tragedy in the British Museum (Portableantiquities photostream on Flickr)

As ian Richardson reports, apparently approvingly ('Medieval Late at the British Museum), the Post-Enlightemnent today relies on edutaining gimmicks:

The Mausoleum of Halikarnassos gallery (Room 2) with its two specially-lit colossal statues formed the stage for a young acting troupe’s twist on Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which was seen by an overflowing crowd of onlookers. Even a presentation on the art of medieval hairdressing for film and theatre was given a dramatic location in front of the Nereid Monument in Room 17.

So I suppose this is the cultural mix-and-match of the Universal Museum in practice. Most "enlightening" I am sure. Was this what these sculted stones were transported across an entire continent to London for? To provide a "cultcheral-innit" backdrop to some tomfoolery that could have been done equally artistically in a shopping mall? What does the bloke with a cycling helmet on his head add to anyone's appreciation of the statues from Halicarnassus. That is Bodrum, Turkey. Maybe they should go back too to where they might be subjected to fewer indignities than they do in the BM's peculiar brand of dumb-down "outreach".

Ecuador to US Museum: Stop Hiding Our Treasures

Excavations at Cerro de Hojas-Jaboncillo, an archaeological site discovered by American explorer Marshall Saville in 1906, are now housed in a storeroom of a Washington museum. The site in the damp coastal region of the country covers some 3,500 hectares and is one of the largest in Ecuador. The  pre-Columbian inhabitants of the site belonged to the Manteño culture (which had its era of splendor between the 9th and 14th centuries, roughly parallel to the rise of the Incas in Peru). Here they practiced intensive agriculture, and excavated subterranean silos for crop storage.  The treasure includes monumental stone stelae and "seats of power," stone chairs used by hierarchs of the Manteño culture, and  only three seats of this kind remain in Ecuador.The finds of the 1906 excavations were removed legally.
Now there are calls from the government in Quito for the US museum to actually display the more than 3000 finds they hold in storage  so people can have a better appreciation of Ecuador's history.

"This is the largest collection of Manteño culture" in existence, the Cerro de Hojas-Jaboncillo project director Jorge Marcos told Efe. [...] "We were familiar with the scholarly papers about the pieces and we knew that the National Museum of the American Indian had an important Ecuadorian archaeological collection, but we didn't know how much or what its value was," Heritage Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa said in a press conference Monday. Knowledge of these works was limited to published references and the reports of a handful of Ecuadorian archaeologists who were able to see them including Marcos, who examined them in their original boxes in a New York warehouse in 1971 when he was studying at the University of Illinois. Last week he saw them again together with Espinosa in the conservation rooms of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington.
"What we found there is of the very finest quality," the minister said, adding that some of the pieces are absolutely unique and of greater value than any in Ecuador.[...] For now, Ecuador has chosen to cooperate with the U.S. museum, though Espinosa did not rule out that in the future her country might ask for "part of that collection."

Fox News, Latino, 'Ecuador to US Museum: Stop Hiding Our Treasures', May 15, 2012

Observer on The Parthenon Marbles

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Henry Porter ('The Greeks gave us the Olympics. Let them have their marbles', Observer 20 May 2012) thinks the Parthenon Marbles should go back to Greece.  On a recent visit to the Duveen gallery which houses these sawn-off bits of an Athens building he notes that:

The only allusion to the controversy of the continued presence in this country that I could find in the museum was a notice near the entrance to the Duveen Gallery. "Elgin's removal of the sculptures from the ruins of the building has always been a matter for discussion," it says with a dry little cough before briskly moving on. "But one thing is certain – his actions spared them further damage by vandalism, weathering and pollution."[...] it's hard to fathom a logic that suggests that the advantages of this order of pillage include saving the sculptures from vandalism. That would justify cutting a section of Botticelli's Birth of Venus from its frame to preserve it from any future vandals. 

But this "rescuing the past" excuse is so often used by artefact hunters and collectors everywhere, and regardless of the true facts, to justify what they do - however dubious that is from other points of view. The Parthenon marbles "represent the core of Greek civilisation, and they are the beating heart of modern Greek identity" says Porter:

And, as important, the sculptures really represent half the building that was constructed between 447BC and 432BC to mark the defeat of the Persians by Athens. If you ask the people who argue passionately for retention when they last went to see the marbles, it is striking how few have been in the past five years. It seems to be simply a matter of patriotic possession to them, rather than any great love of art. And talking of possession, they always tend to forget that the sculptures were prised from the Parthenon when the Turks ruled the Greeks, and they could not defend the emblems of their glorious past. [...] To weigh the issue, you need only ask yourself if Elgin's behaviour would be acceptable today. Of course it wouldn't, and nor would we expect to keep the result of such looting. So why do we hold on to these ill-gotten sculptures now? [...] we should begin to address a simple truth: the Parthenon marbles are not ours to keep.

Photo:  The British Museum's marbles as a setting for Children's play. Photograph: Richard Baker/Corbis.

Turkey's Cultural Property Repatriation Drive

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The Economist looks at Turkey’s cultural ambitions as it "launches a new culture war" and "gets tough with foreign museums" holding  stuff looted from Turkey ('Of Marbles and Men', May 19th 2012): 

The mildly Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, led by the Justice and Development (AK) party, likes to think of itself as the heir of the Ottoman sultans. The Turkish authorities have recently launched a wave of cultural expansionism, building new museums, repairing Ottoman remains, licensing fresh archaeological excavations and spending more on the arts. A grand museum in the capital, Ankara, is due to open in time for the centenary of the Turkish republic in 2023. “It will be the biggest museum in Turkey, one of the largest in Europe; an encyclopedic museum like the Metropolitan or the British Museum (BM),” boasts an aide to Ertugrul Gunay, the culture and tourism minister. “It’s his baby, his most precious project.” Turkey’s cultural plans at home are coupled with an unprecedentedly bold campaign to bring back treasures that it believes were stolen, which now sit in Western museums. These plans enjoy political support across the spectrum and the backing of all Turkey’s museum directors. The campaign targets many more objects and museums than the government has so far let on. “We are not waging a battle,” says Mr Gunay. “But this is definitely a struggle in the field of culture. And we are determined to boost our efforts in a more determined and more persistent way.”

It would be interesting to see  from the collectors currently decrying Turkey's efforts to repatriate stolen artefacts a reasoned argument why Turkey should not build a Universal Museum. Why should they be restricted to just a few nations ? And maybe Turkey deserves one:

Growing economic power and stalled talks over EU membership make many Turks feel that it is time to turn their backs on the West. Amid the turmoil of the Arab spring Turkey believes it can become the leader of the region.

The Economist's journalist is clearly on the side of the rich western museums and collectors, referring to the fact that stuff was ripped off and ripped up in the nineteenth century saved them:

removed treasures they believed might be at risk from war and insurrection, and gave them to the new European museums. Foreign scholars saved a considerable number of Turkish artefacts from being commercially looted or destroyed by invading armies. This is rarely mentioned in Turkey’s discussions about its archaeological past.

So looting stuff for yourself to "save' the objects from being looted by somebody else? That's the old metal detectorists' argument too. The economist grudgingly points out that "though Turkey passed a law in 1884 (updated in 1906) stating that all antiquities were the property of the state and could not be taken out of the country, this was only loosely enforced" and looters helped themselves to what they fancied. They present it as going back on some form of gentlemen's agreement that the Turkish government today "argues that any object without the correct permissions or with gaps in its provenance has been stolen and so belongs to Turkey".

The article gives its readers some details of some recent demands:
The Weary Hercules (returned to Turkey from BMFA in September 2011)
The Hattusas sphinx sent back after May 2011 from the Pergamon Museum,
Metropolitan Museum of Art (September 2011),

The Samsat Stela in the British Museum,

Turkey has many other museums in its sights. A list of artworks being sought abroad indicates the culture ministry has made similar demands of the Louvre, the Pergamon, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the Davids Samling Museum in Denmark, the Dumbarton Oaks Museum in Washington, DC, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Getty. It has also claimed stolen antiquities that have been seized by police in Frankfurt, Florence, Bulgaria, Switzerland and Scotland.

It seems Ertugrul Gunay could soon be taking the place in the Cultural Property Repatriation drive that  was (is?) occupied by Egypt's Zahi Hawass. His ministry is beefing up its anti-smuggling and intelligence bureau, and will soon add criminal and legal units to its task force. Gunay explained: “I wholeheartedly believe that each and every antiquity in any part of the world should eventually go back to its homeland. Even if these objects are made of stone, just as people have souls, so do animals, plants and monuments. Taking a monument away destabilises the world and is disrespectful to history”. It seems his stance has a lot of support in today's Turkey.

The Economist sees a problem for the position of those holding artefacts from Turkey:

Turkey is convinced of the justice of its quest. Moreover the culture ministry lumps together objects that were smuggled out of the country illegally with those that were removed—perhaps legally to a place of greater safety, but not provably so—in an era when ownership was judged in a looser way. For Turkey, all of these objects were stolen. It is determined to get them back. [...] counting any object acquired without a distinct contract as stolen should alarm museums everywhere.

The fact that Turkey seems to be treating cases in the same manner whether they are pre-1970 or post-1970 (which of course is its sovereign right to do - especially in the light of the 1884 law) means that it lays its own museums open to similar claims. During the period of the Ottoman Empire, a number of important antiquities were taken (the Economist suggests they were all "forcibly removed") to central museums in what is now Turkey, and thus taken from their homelands which are today separate countries.


Photo: Ertugrul Gunay, the Turkish culture and tourism minister.