Kent Flannery once likened the archaeological process to ethnographic work where the informant is killed after fieldwork so that no one else could get to the information. It is because of this that archaeologists are so protective of the material record to which they have access. In recent years, perhaps because of the current condition of Iraq, the issue of looting has come to the forefront of these concerns.
Scholarly groups like the Archaeological Institute of America and the American Schools of Oriental Research have offered a number of ethical and scholarly guidelines meant to stem the tide of looting, or at least limit the archaeological impetus for it. Among these points is not to ever buy, authenticate, or publish artifacts that do not originate with archaeological proveniences. Alternatively, when looting appears imminent, governments or other groups can initiate Cultural Resource Management (CRM) projects. Finally, when necessary and possible, guards are placed on important archaeological sites in order to monitor and protect material remains. This can come in the form of military guards, armed locals, or park rangers. All of these approaches have the benefit of protecting artifacts and allowing for ethical and scientific archaeology.
In a recent issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Editor Hershel Shanks offers an approach to looting that he favors, turn archaeologists into looters. Instead of supporting the various efforts of site protection and looting mitigation, Shanks suggests that scholars dig sites and sell their artifacts to museums for funding. On the surface this may seem like a reasonable idea, but it is quite problematic, and is more likely an attempt by Shanks to sidestep the efforts of major scholarly organizations to stem looting. This should come as no surprise as Shanks has effectively staked his name and made a point of supporting, authenticating, publishing, and purchasing looted artifacts. If the attempts by credible archaeologists to stem looting took hold across the spectrum of scholars, his publication would largely be out in the cold, and he would have to face the music behind the number forged artifacts he had supported in recent years.
Perhaps the greatest problem, as far as I see it, is the focus that this funding strategy will force on scholars. Effectively, archaeologists will be forced to produce objects with museum draw in order to get funding. This would shut down scholars who work with things like faunal analysis or paleoethnobotany. Generally, museum goers do not want to see a bunch of seeds or some gnawed bones (though I think they rock). Instead, well preserved ritual objects and rare items will be the greatest target for archaeologists. This may be a bit of a problem at present, anyway, but this funding plan will certainly exacerbate the problem. Of course, Shanks will likely not be too concerned with this, since he works largely in the culture-historic archaeology of the Iron Age Levant, and has a history of publishing fantastic items without context, authenticity, or un-forged inscriptions.
A second problem is the lack of scientific concern in the buy-artifacts funding plan. Currently, funding applications compete on a basis of wide applicability, potential of publications, and scientific value. Under the museum oriented plan Shanks proposes, this disappears, leaving behind one of the checks that shapes scholarly work today. Instead of peer review on projects and possibilities choosing funding, it will be the possibility of aesthetically pleasing finds. Of course, if buying finds is a source of funding, publication could become a moot concern for many archaeologists. For many in the biblical field this is enough of a problem already, and anything that can be done to prevent backsliding should be done.
An additional concern is the ownership of artifacts. If museums are buying artifacts, they own them. This takes them out of the public sphere and away from the groups that have cultural rights to them. Archaeologists should by now be familiar with these issues, and recognize the failure required by Shanks’ proposal. Either archaeologists must sell heritages, or never actually dig sites that would fall under NAGPRA or similar legal or ethical forces. This is interesting, considering Shanks works primarily with archaeology that occurs in Israel, which owns all of the artifacts in the country. If scholars started working under the museum funded model proposed in BAR, Israelite scholarship would grind to a halt.
The proposal put forth by Shanks is not new, and it is as much a failure today as it ever was. In fact, the growing understanding of ethics that has appeared in archaeology should let scholars recognize it as an even larger failure than it ever was. The model of archaeological funding proposed in BAR is an ethical terror and a complete abandonment of the scientific method in favor of antiquated antiquarian looting and the murder of informants without any interviews.
Shanks, Hersehl (2008) “First Person” in Biblical Archaeology Review 34 (6)
Filed under: Archaeology, Archaeoporn, Looting, Preservation, Religion | Tagged: Archaeoporn, Biblical Archaeology Review, Hershel Shanks, Looting
Absolutely. Under that sort of plan, even sites like Stonehenge and Durrington Walls wouldn’t have funding for excavation – unless you’re going to sell the actual stones to people. But who’s going to pay for a few chunks of charcoal or a broken bit of antler pick?
I didn’t think people still put any faith in schemes like this one – thanks for blogging it.
I think that sort of system would cause a lot of archaeological programs to lose funding. No museum wants to buy a bag of rusty nails from a civil war era structure, and at the archaeological internship I did in college, nails like that made up the bulk of our findings — we did come across a few other artifacts like a bone-handled knife and some African beads — but nails and deer bone were in abundance.