10-15-2009, 01:20 PM
Ruben--perhaps I am cynical. And please--I have great respect for archaeologists who do honest work,and I very much enjoy your posts, as you are one of the best informed posters on this forum. No personal slight intended.
But I have to concur with Paul's comments--even if it hurts me to say so
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In addition (here's my cynicism again) I can't see why a helmet that was looted from Greece by an "official" expedition in a time when field notes were fairly haphazard and local workers were used for the "dirty parts" (say, 1850-1939) is actually, morally or physically different from a helmet that was purchased from an antiquities dealer in the same period. What about helmets in museums that came from private purchase? Are we dismissing the entire Walters Collection, for example? The Royal Ontario Museum collection?
And why? Why find philosophical reasons (and hollow ones, I assert) to limit the sets and sub-sets of study on grounds that are opaque to the informed amateur?
Provenance maters. I agree--where it is available and unimpeachable. But it is merely "good to have" and hardly essential to the study of artifacts in contexts that matter to many of us--social, military, technical, even artistic.
Archaeology, as a science, is not well enough conducted to have such ludicrous standards. You an I both know that most digs are conducted to further existing theories rather than to accept whatever comes from the ground--they are funded in many cases by the same donors who, themselves, feed the art market; we know that in the past thirty years, hundreds if not thousands of digs that failed to find "major artifacts" have opened, dug ground, and closed and will NEVER be published (reducing them to the level of looting expeditions). We know that site surveys are a vanishing art--need I go on?
I'm not cynical--I'm a realist when it comes to human behavior. Let us decry the art thieves for what they are. Let's ridicule them. But when we need to use their work--let's use them. To the betterment of human knowledge, which is the only worthwhile goal.
And now I'll climb off my soap box and return to my reproduction of a Boeotian shield...
But I have to concur with Paul's comments--even if it hurts me to say so
.In addition (here's my cynicism again) I can't see why a helmet that was looted from Greece by an "official" expedition in a time when field notes were fairly haphazard and local workers were used for the "dirty parts" (say, 1850-1939) is actually, morally or physically different from a helmet that was purchased from an antiquities dealer in the same period. What about helmets in museums that came from private purchase? Are we dismissing the entire Walters Collection, for example? The Royal Ontario Museum collection?
And why? Why find philosophical reasons (and hollow ones, I assert) to limit the sets and sub-sets of study on grounds that are opaque to the informed amateur?
Provenance maters. I agree--where it is available and unimpeachable. But it is merely "good to have" and hardly essential to the study of artifacts in contexts that matter to many of us--social, military, technical, even artistic.
Archaeology, as a science, is not well enough conducted to have such ludicrous standards. You an I both know that most digs are conducted to further existing theories rather than to accept whatever comes from the ground--they are funded in many cases by the same donors who, themselves, feed the art market; we know that in the past thirty years, hundreds if not thousands of digs that failed to find "major artifacts" have opened, dug ground, and closed and will NEVER be published (reducing them to the level of looting expeditions). We know that site surveys are a vanishing art--need I go on?
I'm not cynical--I'm a realist when it comes to human behavior. Let us decry the art thieves for what they are. Let's ridicule them. But when we need to use their work--let's use them. To the betterment of human knowledge, which is the only worthwhile goal.
And now I'll climb off my soap box and return to my reproduction of a Boeotian shield...
Qui plus fait, miex vault.
