In 1998 I, my hubby and my in-laws got to pretend we were Indiana Jones for a few hours.
Hubby & I had driven down to Florida to join his parents for a week at a family condo in Clearwater, and in the news before we left I saw a startling news item:
Three years earlier, U.S. Customs officials at Miami International Airport, searching for drugs, discovered a large crate in a Lufthansa Airlines warehouse that was on its way to Zurich, Switzerland. It had been labelled as “Peruvian handicrafts”, with a declared value of $2,764, but it aroused the suspicion of the customs people. Inside the crate, they found 208 stolen ancient artifacts, with an estimated actual value of over $1 million. However, their cultural and historical value was immeasurable.
And if not for the astute ‘nose’ of the customs agents, the mummified head of a woman dating back to 200 B.C., a gold chest plate from 200 A.D. a set of earplugs from 1100 A.D. and other priceless artifacts would have disappeared permanently from Peru’s history.
They which were seized, and would be returned to Peru. For a brief time, however, they were on display at the Florida International Museum in St. Petersburg.
As massive Indiana Jones fans, hubby & I were keen to go and see them, and my in-laws were happy to go along, so we trundled off to see “Empire of Mystery: The Incas, The Andes and Lost Civilizations”. The exhibit had been set up like an ancient Incan temple, jungle foliage and all, to showcase these artifacts of Peruvian culture, and I have to say, we had so much fun wandering through it.
Looting of artifacts, whether from their original location or from museums that have them in their collections, is a vast and profitable business. Before archeology became a regulated science, many ancient parts of Egypt and Greece were straight up ‘looted’ by pseudo-archeologists like Giovanni Battista Belzoni, who had no formal training and treated Egypt as his personal warehouse. He carted all kinds of items to England, some of which remain the British Museum.
Now, I’ve loved visiting the British Museum – you can see marvelous things there. However, they, along with most museums in the world, haven’t been the most scrupulous in obtaining their artifacts. So it’s with some irony that they’re now searching for a Treasure Hunter to recover 900 missing items. There were 1,500; 600 have been already been recovered.
I haven’t been able to find the actual job posting, but the job has been all over the news.
What would the skills requirements be for such a job, I wondered. I’m picturing someone like Professor Sydney Fox in the television series Relic Hunter – kick-ass outfit, a punch that could take out most men, and a brilliant mind that could get her and her assistant Nigel out of any sticky situation.
This is what Google came up with:
1. Investigative & Detective Skills, including expertise in the Art Market (of course) and the ability to track items through global art markets, auction houses, and private collectors; Research & Forensics (to be able to track stolen items), and “Global Outreach & Negotiation”. That would be assuming that whoever has trafficked the items would be willing to negotiate their return. Sure.
2. Specialized Knowledge, with expert Archaeological Knowledge (in this case, particularly pertaining to Greek and Roman gems and gold jewelry), Material Analysis (identifying and protecting the items in question), and proficient understanding of Legal & Ethical laws.
3. Diplomatic & Professional Skills. Oh, I like this one. Patience & Persistence; Collaboration with international law enforcement, museums, and private collectors (I’d like to be a fly on the wall for some of those meetings!); and “Risk Management”. That last one seems an understatement.
I don’t know where Google pulled these from or how accurate they are, but they seem reasonable. I can only imagine the CV of someone applying for the job. Would firearm proficiency show up on it somewhere? Or the ability to crack a whip with maximum threat? And I’m trying to visualize the interview, particularly the applicant. The mind boggles.
It’s a sad fact that looting has been going on for millennia. Almost all of the extant tombs in Egypt had already been rifled for artifacts by the time they were ‘discovered’ by archeologists, which is why the intact tomb of Tutankhamun, found by Howard Carter in 1922, was such a spectacular and famous find.
When we visited ancient Chauchilla Cemetery in Peru a number of years ago, we were shown the evidence of grave-robbing that had once taken place: bones, once someone’s body parts, strewn across the blazing desert sands. The government stepped in 1997 to preserve and protect what remained of the site.
The export of antiquities is now heavily controlled by law in almost all countries and by the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.
But that hasn’t stopped the trafficking. There was a fun episode of the Castle television series, Wrapped Up in Death, in which a respected archeologist decided to make some money by selling a minor mummy in a museum’s collection. Of course he was murdered, which led to an investigation that uncovered the entire nefarious plot.
The British Museum has, according to its own public record, at least 8 million objects in its collection. At any given time, only one percent, about 80,000 items, are on display. Roughly 50% is housed at the actual museum in Bloomsbury, London; the rest is in 194 storerooms.
One has to ask, what the heck do they need so many artifacts for, when for the most part, 7.92 million don’t see the light of day.
Significant pressure has been put on the museum in recent years to repatriate the famous Elgin Marbles, which are actually pieces of the frieze originally decorating the Parthenon in Athens. In the 19th century, Lord Elgin, the British Ambassador, was given permission by the Ottoman Empire, which was the governing authority in Athens at the time, to remove some of the sculptures. He did it under the guise of ‘saving them from the weather’. But Greece would like them back. The museum so far has refused. There are negotiations to return at least some of them, which Greece is well able to care for.
So again, I point out the irony of the museum trying to recover a small portion of its many treasures, which may not have the most respectable provenance themselves.
An organization called The Art Loss Register (ALR) maintains “the world’s largest private database of lost, stolen and looted art, antiques and collectibles”. They’re currently listing over 700,000 items. Not all of these ‘belong’ to museums; some are family heirlooms.
But there’s another organization, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, that digs into how legal some museum acquisitions are. One of their biggest cases exposed decades of shady dealings by 1960s Director Thomas Hoving of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who sought to bolster the institution’s reputation in the world.
Journalists examined the museum’s catalogue and found at least 1,109 pieces that had come from people who had been either indicted or convicted of antiquities crimes. Fewer than half of them have any records describing how they left the country of origin, and many were removed after international guidelines were already put into place. 309 of them are still on display in the museum.
In his 1994 memoir, Director Hoving wrote that his address book of “smugglers and fixers” and other connections “was longer than anyone else’s in the field”. Well, that’s something to boast about. Although, in certain circles I’m sure it is.
So should you be considering applying for that rather exciting position with the British Museum, while packing a tidy little pistol and other appropriate equipment, you might have to leave your ethics at home. Just saying.