Today, Saudi Arabia is known as the religious center for the world's Muslims and the World's major supplier of petroleum products. In past times, however, the Arabian Peninsula was known for the trade in incense and copper. The Sackler has organized an excellent exhibit that focuses on Arabia's early cultures, but also touches on Saudi Arabia's more recent Islamic past. Some of the more interesting objects include anthropomorphic steles and altars from the 4th C. B.C. as well as some classical Greek and Roman objects that were imported in trade.
Kudos to the Sackler, the Saudi Government, Exxon Mobile and Saudi Aramco for arranging this excellent exhibit of unusual artifacts from the Arabian Peninsula. I'm only sorry that there were no early coins on display from the pre-Islamic period.
PAS Harnesses the Power of the Public
The Art Newspaper has written favorably about the PAS and its efforts to record evidence of the past in Britain and Wales. Of course, the PAS records coins and other artifacts, but this effort has fostered academic research as well. As the article explains:
The information provided by members of the public over the last 15 years is available for all to see on the PAS database. This now contains around 810,000 items and spans objects dating from the Stone Age to Anglo-Saxon, Roman, medieval, and post-medieval times. Every entry includes archaeological information on the object in question, details of where it was discovered and often incorporates notes of scholarly interest. The database provides a historical snapshot of human settlement in England and Wales and is an awesome example of what can be achieved by harnessing the power of the public.
�It�s now a major academic resource,� says Bland. �There are 66 people using it for their PhDs and 140 other post-graduate students or undergraduates using it for their dissertations as well as around 12 major funded research projects [working on it], one of them with �150,000 from the Leverhulme Trust to allow us to analyse the factors underlying the data.�
Given these successes, it's hard to understand the hostility still shown it in parts of the archaeological blogosphere and the unwillingness to consider whether it can be adapted in some fashion in countries like Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy.
The amounts spent on PAS would seem to give far more "bang for the buck" (or perhaps pound in this case) than many archaeological programs. Perhaps the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and USAID should consider funding a pilot program in a source country like Bulgaria. The costs could be minimal compared to the amounts spent on archaeology in places like Iraq and Egypt.
The information provided by members of the public over the last 15 years is available for all to see on the PAS database. This now contains around 810,000 items and spans objects dating from the Stone Age to Anglo-Saxon, Roman, medieval, and post-medieval times. Every entry includes archaeological information on the object in question, details of where it was discovered and often incorporates notes of scholarly interest. The database provides a historical snapshot of human settlement in England and Wales and is an awesome example of what can be achieved by harnessing the power of the public.
�It�s now a major academic resource,� says Bland. �There are 66 people using it for their PhDs and 140 other post-graduate students or undergraduates using it for their dissertations as well as around 12 major funded research projects [working on it], one of them with �150,000 from the Leverhulme Trust to allow us to analyse the factors underlying the data.�
Given these successes, it's hard to understand the hostility still shown it in parts of the archaeological blogosphere and the unwillingness to consider whether it can be adapted in some fashion in countries like Bulgaria, Cyprus, Greece, and Italy.
The amounts spent on PAS would seem to give far more "bang for the buck" (or perhaps pound in this case) than many archaeological programs. Perhaps the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs and USAID should consider funding a pilot program in a source country like Bulgaria. The costs could be minimal compared to the amounts spent on archaeology in places like Iraq and Egypt.
Cultural Heritage Center Website Updated
The Cultural Heritage Center's website has been spiffed up with pictures, including one of Hillary Clinton gazing at a Greek statute. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs' tag line "promoting mutual understanding" rings hollow for ancient coin collectors at least. Indeed, ECA's controversial import restrictions on millions of ancient Greek, Roman and Chinese coins of the sort avidly collected world-wide has, if anything, greatly harmed people to people contacts between collectors in the US and foreign countries. Why not promote ancient coin collecting, and the cultural understanding it fosters (at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer), rather than seek to suppress it to the benefit of no one but a small number of academic archaeologists and their patrons in foreign cultural bureaucracies?
No Sense of Humor or Balance, Just Useful Cover?
I guess on reflection it's not all that surprising that the archaeological blogosphere, what with its archaeology over all fanaticism, lacks a sense of humor. Or that somehow an advertisement for the sale of a collection of Islamic coins becomes a springboard for a diatribe against the seller (the ACCG's founder), the collector (a man of the cloth), the Arab Spring (dislocation dethrones some of archaeology's friends in the region?), American Culture (grasping rather than free?), and U.S. Foreign Policy (US made tear gas and "political assasination drones" rather than support for democracy and vast amounts of foreign aid?). But if so, how can the State Department bureaucracy really take the rants of such archaeologists whether in the blogosphere or in comments to CPAC seriously? Or do they just provide a useful cover for State's proclivity to trade the interests of US small businesses, collectors and museums for the fleeting good will of some foreign potentate?
Re-Repatriation
Germany has agreed to repatriate a winged seahorse brooch back to Turkey. The brooch is the most significant piece from the so-called Lyidan Hoard that was first repatriated to Turkey by the MET back in the 1993, but then illegally sold off by a Turkish Museum director to help pay off gambling debts. Given the embarassing situation, Turkish officials have not been exactly seeking extensive publicity for the return. It remains unclear how the brooch got to Germany, and what, if any, plans the Turkish government has to secure it in the future.
Thanksgiving: Khouli Sentenced to Home Detention
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York has sentenced Mousa ("Morris") Khouli to six months of home detention and one year probation for smuggling Egyptian antiquities by way of false declarations on customs forms. The prosecutor had asked for 46-57 months of incarceration, but the Court evidently was swayed by a sentencing memorandum prepared by Khouli's lawyer that outlined the relatively modest sentences given for other "cultural property" crimes.
The blood-thirsty archaeological blogosphere will likely be aghast at the length of the sentence. But then again, as set forth in the declaration of Jay Kislak appended to ACCG's recently filed petition for rehearing there is credible evidence to suggest that certain individual(s) at the US Department of State misled Congress and the public in official reports about import restrictions on Cypriot coins and have yet to be called into account in any fashion whatsoever.
Is it really more serious to mislead on a customs form than in an official government report sent to Congress? And let's not forget that the very same State Department bureaucrats involved in the Cypriot coin controversy are also intimately involved in coordinating repatriations like that at issue in the Khouli case through the State Department's "Cultural Antiquities Task Force." Why should they be above the law?
The blood-thirsty archaeological blogosphere will likely be aghast at the length of the sentence. But then again, as set forth in the declaration of Jay Kislak appended to ACCG's recently filed petition for rehearing there is credible evidence to suggest that certain individual(s) at the US Department of State misled Congress and the public in official reports about import restrictions on Cypriot coins and have yet to be called into account in any fashion whatsoever.
Is it really more serious to mislead on a customs form than in an official government report sent to Congress? And let's not forget that the very same State Department bureaucrats involved in the Cypriot coin controversy are also intimately involved in coordinating repatriations like that at issue in the Khouli case through the State Department's "Cultural Antiquities Task Force." Why should they be above the law?
Repatriation as a Diplomatic Tool?
Pity poor old U.S News and World Report. It used to be one of the three major news weekly magazines. Now, it's reduced to a web-only publication that in the search for free content has uncritically promoted the views of those ideologically opposed to collecting that repatriation has a real value as a �diplomatic tool.� But, as I have pointed out in comments to the article,
� While antiquities should be repatriated in clear cases, the problem is that all too often they are repatriated in unclear situations where the same types of artifacts are openly available for sale in a particular country. How does this happen? Academics with axes to grind against collectors gin up publicity, that gets foreign governments and then our government involved. And given the modest values of many objects and the costs of mounting a legal defense, it�s the rare case where it makes financial sense to contest the seizure-- so the Government wins by default, and hard questions are never asked about the real situation in the source country.
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