Illegal Antiquities Trade: Mesopotamian Vase

How will we ever solve this culture-destroying problem? Archeology 30.06.2009 Mesopotamian vase sheds light on Germany's artefacts trade A legal dispute surrounding an antique golden vase being held in a museum vault in Mainz shines light on the surprisingly important role Germany plays in the often shady world of antiques trading. The case sounds more like an esoteric crime novel than a simple legal tussle, involving as it does archaeologists, rare-coin dealers, customs officials, and the Iraqi embassy in Berlin. At its heart is a golden vase just six centimeters high that may or may not have its origins in ancient Mesopotamia. The vase is currently being held by Michael Mueller-Karpe, an archaeologist at the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz, Germany. Three years ago he was charged with providing the court with an expert opinion on the provenance of the object, which is at the center of a lawsuit over fencing illegally trafficked goods. Archaeologist refuses to comply Now Mueller-Karpe is ignoring a court order, and refuses to turn the vase back over to the customs officials who confiscated it. The Iraqi embassy in Berlin has asked him not to, he says. Apparently they believe the object is safer where it is. Contrary to reports in the German media, the Stuttgart Customs Investigations Office is not about to break into the vault at the Roman-Germanic museum and grab the vase by force. "I don't know how that rumor got started, but it's not true," said Dieter Peulen, the acting director of the Stuttgart Customs Investigation Office. He would, however, like to get the object back. "I've never seen anything like this before," said Peulen. "At the moment, [the vase] has been confiscated by customs. [Mueller-Karpe] doesn't own it. In my opinion, the court has requested him to give it back, and he should do so." The vase showed up in Germany years ago in the catalog of a Munich auction house, designated as a Mediterranean piece from the Roman Iron Age. But someone familiar with Mesopotamian art spotted it, and sued the auctioneer for breach of the Foreign Trade Law. Stolen objects transit through Germany As part of the suit, customs officials brought the object to the museum in Mainz to have its provenance checked. Mueller-Karpe said the vase is "most probably" around 4,500 years old, and believes it was stolen by grave robbers from the ancient royal cemetery in the city of Ur, Iraq. Its provenance may be researched further as the case moves through the courts, said customs official Peulen. International traffic in antiques and artefacts from Iraq has bloomed since the fall of Saddam Hussein. According to the Spiegel Online newsmagazine, of the 15,000 pieces that were robbed from the National Museum in Baghdad in the wake of the US invasion in 2003, just 6,000 have been returned. Many of the missing objects - and more stolen from grave robbers around Ur - make their way through German auction houses at some point on their travels. Indeed, the case sheds light on Germany's overall role in both antiques trading and antiques trafficking - a distinction that is often hard to make when it comes to the sale of ancient objects, experts say. 'Unfortunate' legal situation Germany was the last industrial country to sign a UNESCO convention on protecting cultural heritage, and its loose demands for documentation on exports of some ancient objects seen as being friendly to fencers and smugglers. "The legal situation in Germany is very unfortunate for us," the Iraqi culture attache in Berlin told Spiegel Online. The burden of proof, "especially for objects stolen by grave robbers," is too high, he said. "Even an expert opinion with a probability of provenance of 95 percent isn't enough for the courts." According to Mueller-Karpe, the two-handled vase - which he believes is a "miniature version" of a Sumerian-era vase that would have served a functional purpose - remains in the museum for the time being. He told dpa news agency that it would be too dangerous for him to give it back to customs authorities, since the Iraqis have threatened that anyone who is involved in helping fence stolen goods could face a sentence of up to five years in Iraq. Since he is frequently on archaological digs in Iraq, Mueller-Karpe said, the sentence threat means he would lose his opportunity to work. Author: Jennifer Abramsohn Editor: Kate Bowen

Looters Damage Priceless Artifacts

Article from Turkish press. Are there no lengths to which looters will go in an attempt to get things to sell on the black market for money? This just makes me sick. Historical artifacts damaged in Mersin MERSİN - It is reported that several historical artifacts, including reliefs, have been damaged in the Kızkalesi district of Mersin by treasure-hunters using dynamite. According to a statement posted on the Mersin University Klikia Archeological Research Center’s Web site, 11 niches in the Şeytan Valley, where reliefs are carved into the rock walls, were damaged by exploding dynamite. A member of the university’s archaeology department, Associated Professor Murat Durukan, claimed they looters had sabotaged not just Turkey’s, but also whole world’s cultural heritage. He said on the Web site: "The situation we experienced here in Mersin is not different to the destruction of historical artifacts in Afghanistan. Being indifferent to this event will damage our country’s image. The authorities should appoint a guard in this place for 24 hours to stop this insanity." Talking to the Anatolia news agency, Durukan said hey had informed police about the incident that happened ten days ago. "The Adamkayalar (the rocks in shape of men) go back to the third century B.C. It is a commemoration ceremony area. These reliefs were made to commemorate important people, mostly Kings, soldiers and priest of that time." Mersin Culture and Tourism District Manager Mehmet Çalışkan said they were aware of the incident. "We already launched an investigation to catch the people who did the damage to this area."

Illegal Antiquities in Chicago - Or Not...

From The Chicago Tribune Loot! Chicago at center of battle between archeologists, collectors A 4,000-year-old artifact turns up at O'Hare. Stolen property or museum piece? By Tom Hundley November 9, 2008 On April 11, 2003, three days after American tanks rumbled into Baghdad and the day after looters swarmed the Iraq National Museum like a plague of locusts, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon press corps enjoyed a little laugh at the expense of Iraq's catastrophe. "The images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over, and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase, and you see it 20 times and you think, 'My goodness, were there that many vases?' Is it possible that there were that many vases in the whole country?" the defense secretary asked with mock astonishment. This was vintage Rumsfeld, and the journalists chuckled appreciatively. The looting would continue for two more days.McGuire Gibson, a man who may know as much about ancient Mesopotamian archeology as anyone on the planet, was horrified by the events in Baghdad and by Rumsfeld's cavalier attitude, but he wasn't particularly surprised. In the months leading up to the U.S. invasion, the distinguished University of Chicago scholar had repeatedly warned the Pentagon and State Department about the likelihood of looting. n The warnings fell on deaf ears. n I had been hearing about the legendary Mac Gibson for years, but I did not meet him until a month after the ransacking of the museum, when I was in Baghdad as a Tribune correspondent and he traveled to that benighted city to inspect the damage for himself.Glass from shattered display cases crackled underfoot as we walked the museum's devastated galleries, Gibson with the aid of a cane, which he occasionally used as a pointer."This chunk of rock is extremely important. We were very worried about it," he said, indicating a 5,000- year-old carved frieze that the looters had ignored. "It shows a guy killing a lion with a bow and arrow. It's important because it is one of the earliest examples of someone acting like a king. All through history, this is what kings do. They hunt," he explained. Gibson, who is 69 and can sometimes come across as ornery, has been sifting through the ruins of Iraq's ancient civilizations for more than four decades. He is president of the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq. His first dig in the country was in 1964, and he has been back pretty much every year since then.After the walk-through, Gibson pronounced his verdict: "We dodged a bullet."This didn't appear to jibe with the mess that I had just seen, but at the time Gibson knew much more about the precarious state of Iraq's archeological heritage than the media or the general public. He knew, for instance, that some of the museum's most precious treasures had been stored for more than a decade in the basement vaults of Iraq's Central Bank. He also knew that something far worse was afoot, that the sack of the National Museum was only a symptom of a much more serious crisis that had been building for more than a decade, ever since Saddam Hussein's defeat in the first Persian Gulf War, a crisis that would soon reach a new crescendo.At the close of the war in 1991, as Saddam fought off insurrections from the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south, the U.S. government imposed a no-fly zone over large swaths of Iraq. This, along with strict UN trade sanctions, created a kind of perfect storm. With the weakened Baghdad regime unable to control large parts of the country, impoverished Iraqi villagers—often with the blessing of village elders—turned to the only source of income available to them: scavenging the hundreds of archeological sites that dot the landscape between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.In some areas, the trade in looted antiquities accounted for almost 85 percent of local economic activity. Meanwhile, a weak U.S. economy at the end of George H. W. Bush's presidency was encouraging the truly rich to look for alternatives to stocks and bonds. Art and antiquities fit the bill. As supply obligingly met demand, the market for Mesopotamian antiquities blossomed. Within months of the war's end, a treasure trove of Mesopotamian antiquities began to show up in the gilded display rooms of auction houses in London and New York, no questions asked."In the 1990s, you couldn't buy a bag of dates from Iraq, but you could buy almost any antiquity you wanted," Gibson said during a recent interview at his musty, book-cluttered office on the second floor of the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute.In the years since the first Gulf War, the ransacking of Iraq's archeological heritage has proceeded at a breathtaking pace. If it has slowed slightly in the last year or so, it is only because the market has become saturated. Archeologists have decried this as a terrible loss to all humanity. Museum directors, whose institutions are the repositories for the most important archeological finds, agree. But a war of words has broken out between the two camps. Archeologists argue that major museums and the wealthy private collectors who often sit on their boards have hastened the destruction of archeological sites by their willingness to pay high prices for objects that have almost certainly been looted. The museum directors and private collectors contend that by rescuing these artifacts from the vicissitudes of the black market they are giving safe shelter to the historical patrimony of all mankind.The high-end trade in illegal antiquities is centered in New York and London, but Chicago has emerged at the vortex of the debate. Earlier this year, the Oriental Institute mounted an important exhibition called "Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq's Past." It will run through the end of the year. On the other side of the argument, James Cuno, director of the Art Institute of Chicago, has recently published a book called "Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over Our Ancient Heritage." In it, Cuno reflects on the meaning and origins of culture, and attempts by government to manipulate culture for political advantage. He also suggests that archeologists are a self-interested group guilty of working all-too-cooperatively with the dodgy regimes that happen to rule the territory where some of the world's most significant archeological sites are located.As president and director of the Art Institute, Cuno presides over a world-class art collection that cuts across the centuries from the ancient to the modern. With thousands of masterpieces to choose from, one of Cuno's favorites is a 14th-Century German monstrance, an 18-inch-tall silver reliquary whose design resembles a Gothic church. Its focal point is an exquisite rock crystal bottle that contains a tooth said to belong to John the Baptist. The bottle, made in medieval Egypt during the Fatimid Caliphate, was originally a vessel for perfume. With the collapse of the Fatimids, it probably ended up in Constantinople, and from there was carried off to northern Europe after Crusaders sacked Byzantium—a textbook example of cultural cross-fertilization producing an artistic masterpiece."Here you have a secular object, made in a Muslim context, transformed into a sacred reliquary for the holiest of Christian saints," explains Cuno.The lesson, he says, is that culture doesn't occur in a vacuum. Items such as the monstrance demonstrate what he describes as the "hybridity and interrelatedness" of the world's cultures."My argument is that there is no such thing as autonomous culture," he says. "Culture has never been ethnically pure; culture is not national."Cuno, 57, is a compact man who inhabits a spacious and tastefully decorated office at the Art Institute. Soft-spoken and solicitous, he carries himself with the air of a slightly distracted Ivy League professor. He arrived in Chicago four years ago after stints as director of the Harvard University art museums and the University of London's prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art.Earlier this year, Cuno was on almost everyone's shortlist to become the next director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art after the aristocratic and long-reigning Philippe de Montebello announced that he was stepping down. Although the Met ultimately picked one of its own curators for the post in September, Cuno's book, which features a photo of the heavily guarded entrance of the Baghdad Museum on the front cover and a ringing endorsement from de Montebello on the back, was seen by some as a not-so-subtle pitch for the job. As it turned out, the controversy that has grown up around book may have hurt his chances.The book is a spirited attack on what Cuno calls "nationalist retentionist cultural property laws." These are the laws that virtually every country in the world uses to protect its archeological sites and claim sovereignty over culturally significant artifacts on its territory. Most of these laws are based on the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, which has been signed and ratified by 93 nations (but not the U.S.), and the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, signed and ratified by 111 nations (including the U.S.).Cuno argues that cultural property laws are chauvinistic and elitist, and that governments use these laws to impose a bogus national identity on cultural objects. The result, he says, is that the world's ancient artistic legacy is in danger of being held hostage to the nationalist agendas of petty tyrants. Rest of article.

Antiquities Smuggling

Antiquities smuggling: Growing problem at US ports By TAMARA LUSH, Associated Press Writer Sun Sep 14, 2:55 PM ET MIAMI - Three years ago, an elderly Italian man pulled his van into a South Florida park to sell some rare, 2,500-year-old emeralds plundered from a South American tomb. But Ugo Bagnato, an archaeologist, didn't know his potential customer was a federal agent. Bagnato flashed the green gems, which were as large as dominoes, and explained to the immigration and customs agent that he had bribed South American authorities and used fake paperwork to smuggle the highly illegal goods into the United States. Authorities discovered Bagnato had a cache of more than 400 artifacts from Peru and Colombia, all predating Columbus' arrival in the Americas: burial shrouds, jewelry, terra cotta pots and other treasures were wedged in boxes in his van and kept in a storage unit. Bagnato was arrested, charged with the sale and receipt of stolen goods, and in 2006, pleaded guilty. He was later deported. It was one of the largest antiquities smuggling cases ever prosecuted in the U.S., but federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement authorities say smuggling of rare artifacts from around the globe into the United States is on the rise — up from 63 cases in fiscal year 2006 to 134 this fiscal year, which ends in two weeks. Such looting robs countries not only of treasures, but of their heritage — and archaeologists say it also destroys valuable research opportunities. "A nation's culture is not for sale. These are not souvenirs to be displayed at someone's house," said Anthony Mangione, a special agent in charge of the Miami office of the agency also known as ICE. But that's exactly what's happening, as artifacts from around the world are surreptitiously carried into the United States and sold by dealers, on eBay or, in the case of Ugo Bagnato, out of the back of a van. There are several recent cases: • On Monday, federal authorities will repatriate some 1,000 items, including a rare temple marker worth $100,000, to Iraq. On June 7, 2001, ICE agents in New York received information from the Art Loss Register that a Sumerian Foundation Cone, buried under a Babylonian temple, was being sold by auction at Christie's New York. ICE New York agents seized the artifact from Christie's and discovered that it, and several other items in the U.S., had been stolen from the Baghdad Museum and other locations at the end of the first Gulf War. • In May, four tons of fossils from Argentina — including 200-million-year-old dinosaur eggs, egg shell fragments, petrified pine cones and fossilized prehistoric crabs — were seized by federal agents in Tucson, Ariz. Authorities said a corporation based in Argentina had brought the fossils into the country. No arrests have been made, but the fossils were repatriated. • In February, an Army pilot was arrested and charged with stealing 370 pre-dynastic artifacts from the Ma'adi Museum near Cairo, Egypt, and selling them to an art dealer in Texas for $20,000. The artifacts, dating to 3000 B.C. and earlier, were originally discovered during excavations in Egypt in the 1920s and 1930s. The pilot, Edward George Johnson, pleaded guilty in June and is awaiting sentencing. "This whole market is driven by the demand for all kinds of antiquities, and the demand is constantly increasing," explained Robert Sharer, curator of the Americas section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. Adding to the problem, too often people who live in poor areas of Latin America, the Middle East and Africa are willing to loot ancient graves for cash. "A lot of pieces are disappearing," said Edouard Planche, an assistant program specialist for UNESCO in France. "And these poorer countries have less capacity to control the illegal smuggling." Many of the smuggled goods are intercepted at U.S. airports and cargo ports. Sometimes Customs and Border Protection agents find antiquities in suitcases. At other times, agents will get tips about smuggled items from confidential informants or by trolling sites such as eBay. If agents are suspicious, they call academic experts for help. Carol Damian, interim director of the Frost Art Museum at Florida International University in Miami, said she's gotten a steady stream of calls in recent years to examine Pre-Colombian artifacts smuggled into South Florida. Sometimes the goods are fake, but occasionally, the rare treasures are breathtaking. Once in the late 1990s, she was called to assess 15 crates smuggled from Peru — and they contained mummies, shrunken heads and gold. "It's the past, it's exotic, it's mysterious," said Damian. The cases can be difficult to prosecute. Federal officials say it's sometimes hard to prove a person or company knew they were smuggling illegal items. "It's very difficult to prove criminal intent," said Joseph Cangro, a cultural artifact expert at ICE. Museums and galleries, meanwhile, are trying to slow the tide of cultural artifacts entering the United States. This summer, the American Association of Museums released guidelines that said institutions should make ownership history records publicly available for all ancient art and archaeological artifacts in their collections and rigorously research new acquisitions. Similar guidelines were published earlier by the Association of Art Museum Directors. Museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, have agreed in recent years to return artifacts to Italy that its government says were looted or stolen. "Each piece represents a building or a site or a tomb and the complete destruction of it and all the information it could have given us," said Karen Olsen Bruhns, a professor emeritus in anthropology at San Francisco State University. "It's gone forever."