The answer depends on the question

Pothunters destroying a site, or a problematic excavation? Photo (cc) gbaku

David Gill has put up an interesting blog post showing how the kind of questions you ask lead you to certain kinds of answer. It’s really interesting to see how the assumptions are skillfully built into questions. The session he picks apart is Tainted Objects, which tackles artefacts of problematic provenance. ((If you’re wondering what problematic means: The evidence against OJ Simpson was problematic.)) The problem starts with the title, he argues. How does being smuggled, or exported with a nod and a wink, taint the artefact? The taint as he rightly says isn’t anywhere in the artefact, it’s with the people who are happy to handle them. And that’s just the start.

He’s also linked to an interview with Jack Davis in Athens News. Davis is the new head of the American School in Athens and the interview is startling from the opening:

At the University of Cincinnati we passed a resolution in our department, which is strongly focused on archaeology, that we would not accept the donation of any antiquities from private sources into our department, and that we would not accept funding for archaeological projects from collectors.

As I recall, and North American readers are welcome to correct me if I’m wrong, Cinncinnati is a major university which could well expect to receive this kind of donation. I know it’s easy to say that you shouldn’t fuel the market by accepting donations from dodgy ‘philanthropists’ and validate their purchases. However when one collector, who is said to have bought artefacts with dirt still on them, offered another university up to $200 million for a new institute, they took it. Saying no to donations when others are accepting them does require huge amounts of integrity. ((Note to the relevant lawyers. I accept that being offered an artefact caked in dirt does not mean there’s any reason to assume it had been recently looted. In much the same way I’d like to reassure OJ’s lawyers that I have no doubt that their client was found innocent. I get email.))

The photo is titled “Pothunters” destroying an archaeological site on the Columbia River (Oregon, USA) and it’s one of the many put up on Flickr by gbaku. He’s been putting up some great images of archaeological excavation in action recently and, even better, they’re available under a Creative Commons licence.