The History Blog

A government audit of 1600 museums has found jaw-droppingly massive inventory shrinkage.

The lost items were worth a total of “several million dollars,” he said, adding most of the disappeared inventory was pre-Revolutionary and Soviet-era medals, weapons and clothes.

Precious works of art were among the missing items but separate investigations were being conducted for those, [Interior Ministry Col. Ilya] Ryasnoi said.

“Yes, there have been thefts. Museum staff have used their contacts to steal some of the artifacts without a trace,” he said. “But most has simply been lost during transportation.”

Wow. I thought “they fell off the back of a truck” is what the thieves are supposed to say, not the victims.

A hundred museum employees have been charged with various minor infractions, but it looks officials are writing the bulk of this one off as “the Soviets lost them”. They don’t have a lot of choice, really, given the deplorable record-keeping at most of these museums.

Hopefully this inquiry will inspire Russian museums to take inventory for real now.

The Uffizi Gallery in Florence will be restoring sculptures in public, starting with Baccio Bandinelli’s 16th c. copy of the famous second century B.C. Greek Laocoön group.

During the “open air restoration”, which will take place behind clear plastic screens, the public can see how restorers use laser technology and deionised water to remove fatty substances, old layers of wax and dust deposits from the priceless sculptures.

Experts will also check the structural strength of the works, paying special attention to repairs done in the past following a fire in the Uffizi in 1762.

As if the Uffizi weren’t interesting enough to visit. Now it’s like an action museum!

Other works slated for restoration as a spectator sport include a Roman statue of Hercules at the end of his labours, two first century Roman busts of unnamed elderly gents, and the marble “Cinghiale” (aka wild boar) which was the model for the bronze “Porcellino” (aka piglet) that has become a symbol of Florence.

A white and blue glazed relief of the archangel Michael by Andrea della Robbia somehow came off its perch above a doorway in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Monday night and crashed to the floor where a security guard found it the next morning.

It’s apparently restorable because it landed on its back, but it has definitely suffered major damage. The face of the archangel is one intact piece, at least, which is important for the restoration to look good.

Mr. Holzer said there were no immediate indications of what caused the sculpture to topple. It was encased in a wooden frame that covered the unglazed back of the terra cotta. The sculpture and frame rested atop the doorway on a steel shelf, with additional steel bolts to secure the top, and there were no apparent signs of rust or water damage behind the piece. […]

The museum said in a statement that “while the Metropolitan routinely and thoroughly inspects its pedestals and wall mounts to reconfirm their structural integrity, it will initiate a reinvigorated museumwide examination as expeditiously as possible in the days that follow this unfortunate accident.” The Met was also reviewing security video to see if it revealed any information about what occurred.

The museum has closed the room in which fell to ensure every last possible chip that might have broken off is found and sent to the conservation area for restoration.

Manchester Museum has enshrouded 3 mummies formerly displayed au naturel after some visitors complained.

The decision has been greeted with dismay, and not a little derision, by archaeologists and museum aficionados alike.

Josh Lennon, a museum visitor, said: “This is preposterous. Surely people realise that if they go to see Egyptian remains some of them may not be dressed in their best bib and tucker.

“The museum response to complaints is pure Monty Python - they have now covered them from head to foot, rendering the exhibition a non-exhibition. It is hilarious.”

Renown Egyptian archaeologist and secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council on Antiquities Zawi Hawass, on the other hand, is all for the cover-up.

“Covering up the mummies is a very important decision. I myself am of this position on an ethical basis, not a religious one,” Hawass told reporters in Cairo.

“We don’t want people to see our naked bodies when we are dead, so why should we allow ourselves to view the bodies and expose them in this manner?” he asked.

Fair enough, but I seem to recall seeing rows upon rows of nekkid mummies under plexiglass at the Cairo Museum.

And really, what is the point of having them on display at all if they’re completely wrapped in modern cotton? Might as well just throw a bundle of sticks in there and call it Ramses.

Over two hundred antiquities from the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul are hitting the road this spring, including gold pieces from the renown Bactrian hoard.

The exhibition will open at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., starting May 25th, and will move on to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and finally, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The story of how these precious artifacts survived the past few decades of violence and chaos in Afghanistan is a fascinating one.

The so-called Bactrian Hoard, one of the greatest archeological finds of the 20th Century, is the heart of the trove, discovered accidentally in 1978 by Russian archeologist Viktor Sarianidi, Hiebert’s mentor. Six 2,000-year-old nomadic tombs, from an area in northern Afghanistan that was once an important crossroads on the Silk Road, contained more than 20,000 beautifully crafted pieces.

Before Sarianidi could study the items, the Soviets invaded, and he rushed the pieces to Kabul, where they went to the National Museum. That was the last he saw of them.

Unbeknownst to him, 10 years later, as the communist government weakened and rockets rained on the city, a group of museum workers packed the most important artifacts into boxes, sealed them with their signatures and brought them to the presidential palace, where they were stored in a vault.

“Only 13 to 20 people knew about the treasures, and as fighting between the different groups got worse we decided not to tell anyone about them,” said Omara Khan Masoudi, now director of the National Museum in Kabul.

It was not until 2003 that a new government under President Hamid Karzai entered the palace and discovered — in a massive Austrian-made vault, alongside the government’s gold bullion — piles of sealed boxes.

By then, rumors had circulated for decades that the Bactrian Hoard had been looted or taken to Moscow or even melted down, so it was rediscovering the treasure all over again when officials opened those boxes.

The museum workers who saved the antiquities are known as the key-holders. They’ll be accompanying the exhibition along its route because in Afghanistan curators are bound by law to their collections and are personally responsible to ensure their safety.

I think that’s totally cool. They’re sworn guardians of ancient treasure like characters out of Indiana Jones or The Mummy.

It’s actually been on loan at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for almost a hundred years, but the descendants of Eliza Lucas Pinckney have now donated it to the museum.

Pinckney’s dress is an excellent example of a typical sack-back dress from the period, and it is only one of two in the Smithsonian collection that has both the original matching stomacher and petticoat. A sack, or robe à la française, has flowing pleats that fall from the shoulders, making the gown appear to be unfitted in the back. A stomacher is a decorative piece that covers the front of the corset, where the gown’s bodice edges were intentionally separated.

The dress is notable not just for its beauty and rarity, but also because its original wearer, Eliza Lucas Pinckney, was an immensely successful business woman who ran her father’s plantations from the age of 16 and pretty much single-handedly provided South Carolina with the cash crop that sustained it in the decades between the decline of rice and the advent of cotton: indigo.

The silk threads woven into the golden gown were spun from silk worms she herself bred, in fact, in one of her many successful agricultural experiments.

In the eastern corner of Oregon, in the Gold Rush town of John Day, lies a building completely unique in the annals of American history: the Kam Wah Chung & Company museum.

Constructed as a trading post in 1876, the Kam Wah Chung building was bought in 1888 by two Chinese immigrants, Lung On and Ing “Doc” Hay, who transformed it into a social, medical, recreational, religious, retail center. The company offered everything from pulsology consults and herbal medicine courtesy of Doc Hay, to labour contracting courtesy of Lung On, to Chinese newspapers, dry goods, a hot meal and a bed, games of Go, an unofficial post office for communications with China, and an opium den in the kitchen.

A description of the invaluable work Long On and Ing Hay did for the community from the Kam Wah Chung National Historic Landmark registration form (pdf):

Ing Hay’s practice covered wide areas of Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and Nevada and through his mail order service, even more distant places. He saw patients in person either through office visits or house calls. Patients also wrote to him describing their symptoms and he diagnosed the illness, sent the herbal remedy with detailed instructions on what to do, and continued the correspondence until the patient was cured. Once he concocted a brew with over 83 different herbs to cure a man suffering from swollen feet. He probably inherited a customer list from the previous herbal doctor known as Kam Wah Chung. Newspaper articles, diaries, and letters testified to his success. He saved the lives of all his patients in the 1915 and 1919 flu epidemics in eastern Oregon, allegedly cured cases of meningitis, and saved a person’s limb from being amputated by a western physician.

In John Day, Lung On served as the primary labor contractor from the late 1890s to the early 1900s. Lung On, with his English-language and business skills, helped many Chinese obtain jobs in mines, logging camps, ranches, and restaurants. When a dispute arose, Lung On often stepped in to help find a solution to the problem. Furthermore, when Chinese were not paid due compensation for their labor, Lung On served as a surety in court cases; he supported fellow Chinese in such cases both financially and with his spoken testimony when he vouched for fellow immigrants in court. Although many labor contractors charged fees for their services, it is not clear if Lung On did. In fact, like many businesses in company towns in the West, Lung On would have profited from supplying the new laborers, thus recovering his costs indirectly

There were many such centers in the American West, thanks to the 19th c. influx of Chinese immigrants, but what makes Kam Wah Chung unique is that it is a virtual time capsule.

When Doc Hay became ill and left the premises in 1948, the building was boarded up and left completely alone — no vandals, no treasure hunters, not even any teenagers making out — until it was rediscovered in 1967, restored and opened as a museum in 1976.

Everything that was in that building in 1948 is still there. Every herb, every tin of morphine sulfate, every altar to the gods, every book, every business invoice, every love letter.

A high wood counter with metal boxes and shelves below is along the south wall, and shelving containing cigar and metal boxes, and bags of herbs line the entire north wall. Each box or tin is labeled in Chinese characters. A high shelf above the exterior window on the east side is lined with bags of herbs. Several items are on the counter: vials with remedies, a mortar and pestle for crushing and mixing, scales and weights used to measure the herbs, a Chinese abacus, and a coffee grinder to grind the herbs. Jars and vials on the counter contain items such as a rattlesnake, turtle, and powdered morphine. A bear paw also sits on the counter top. There are approximately 500 herbs and medications found in this room; to date about 250 have been identified and recorded. A small sampling of the medicines and herbs (common names) include wild asparagus, cocklebur, dwarf flowering cherry, clove, chicken gizzards, cardamon, citrus (orange), red pepper, tortoise shell, tiger bone, croton, caladium, summer cypress, onion, astor bean, bamboo, ginger, and pomegranate bark.

Again, this collection is completely unique in the United States, and judging from the Chinese visitors who have commented on it, there’s no historical collection like this to be found in China itself either.

I could quote the whole pdf because really every nook and cranny of this building is crammed with amazing stuff, but I’ll stop here and just suggest that y’all take a look at the document yourselves to get a full sense of what a treasure trove Lung On and Doc Hay left us.

To visit the Kam Wah Chung & Co museum is to step back in time and immerse yourself into the lives of Chinese immigrants in turn of the century America. It’s a one of a kind opportunity, one which I will most certainly avail myself of should I find myself Oregon way.

Indiana Jones latest adventure involves a (doubtless perilous and booby-traped) search for a meso-American skull carved out of crystal.

For a hundred years, crystal skulls purported to be of Mayan or Aztec origins have popped up in museums and private collections around the world, spurring a wide variety of speculation and mythologies.

Smithsonian anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh examines the myth and reality in Archaeology magazine this month.

These exotic carvings are usually attributed to pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, but not a single crystal skull in a museum collection comes from a documented excavation, and they have little stylistic or technical relationship with any genuine pre-Columbian depictions of skulls, which are an important motif in Mesoamerican iconography. […]

These small objects represent the “first generation” of crystal skulls, and they are all drilled through from top to bottom. The drill holes may in fact be pre-Columbian in origin, and the skulls may have been simple Mesoamerican quartz crystal beads, later re-carved for the European market as little mementos mori, or objects meant to remind their owners of the eventuality of death.

The best one, though, is a “third generation” (ie, 20th c.) skull belonging to the family of Indy-like adventurer Frederick Arthur Mitchell-Hedges. Over time it has an acquired a spurious Mayan origin and a mystical reputation for shooting blue light out of the eye sockets and crashing computer hard drives.

If only all fakes could be so bad-ass.

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the looting of the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad. I remember being horrified, aghast, on the verge of tears whenever the realization of what we had lost sunk in.

What I didn’t know is how much worse it could get. How the entire country would be stripped of its (and our) precious history. How archaeological sites that testify to our earliest civilizations, where people first invented writing, cities, the wheel and so much more, would become pockmarked no man’s lands of chaotic rubble.

The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago is hosting an exhibit on the looting of Iraq. Catastrophe! The Looting and Destruction of Iraq’s Past opens this evening in Chicago and will remain until December 31.

The exhibition will consist of photographs as well as objects from the museum’s collection. “It summarizes results of investigations into the looting of the Baghdad Museum and updates efforts to recover the artifacts that were stolen,” said Geoff Emberling, Director of the Oriental Institute Museum.

The exhibition also will document the looting of archaeological sites with a series of aerial photographs that show the increase in damage through the past few years and other ground-level pictures of the looters at work. “A central section illustrates the importance of archaeological context through several case studies that show what is lost when a piece is looted. The exhibit presents an overview of the international trade in antiquities and the ways in which it directly promotes the looting of the sites,” Emberling said.

If anyone has a chance to see this exhibit, please let me know. I would dearly love to hear all about it. Meanwhile, a companion publication is available for sale or freely downloadable as a pdf.

I’ve read it and I cannot recommend it enough. It’s 82 pages long so eminently readable, although painful in the horror it describes. Here’s one example to give you an idea of what you’ll find.

A bull-headed lyre excavated from the Royal Cemetery of Ur and dated ca 2800, B.C.:

That same lyre after looters pillaged the museum on April 10, 2003:

Tonight, SAFE is holding a candlelit vigil in memory of the tragic loss of our cultural heritage. Click here to see if there is a vigil in your area.

On a dig five years ago, University of Calgary archaeologist Julio Mercader found 1000-year old ritual bowls in a cave in Mozambique. Instead of snagging them for his institution as usually happens when Western archaeologists excavate in Africa, Mercader decided to create a local museum, staffed with locals.

Locals are being trained in African archeology, making western and African academic research relevant to the local population.

“I’m grateful that I’m being given the chance to actually be trained,” said Mussa Raja, through a translator.

Raja is an honours student at a university in Mozambique and has been studying archeology at the U of C for the past 41/2 months.

“I’m getting the training in the actual practicality of how to excavate and do field work,” he said.

Raja, who said archeology is a new science for many African universities, has seen the attitudes of his people change when they see a fellow African doing archeological work.

“They’re so happy when it’s not just foreigners there,” said Raja.

The museum, which opens in August, will display the finds made by Mercader’s team, including Stone Age artifacts, and will also feature an interactive centre and an oral history archive.

I call that brilliant. One of the most common justifications I’ve read for western museums buying (often unprovenanced) antiquities on the (totally dirty) market is that the poor locals in their poor war-torn countries couldn’t possibly care for the artifacts as well as the big budget “universal” museums abroad do.

Mercader has now torn that argument to shreds, and he’s just one man doing the best he can. Imagine what museums and universities with endowments and hundreds of people on staff could accomplish if they made the effort to work with local people and institutions to study and display their antiquities.