Month: January 2008

Grave excavation: Australian for tailgate

Modern(ish)

Sydney’s city hall was built on a cemetery, so apparently every time they need to do some renovation work they end up excavating the remains of convicts. The last coffin/headstone type graves were moved in the 1880s, but convicts weren’t so formally buried, so their remains may have shifted.

This time around officials issued a public invitation to visit the site while it’s being excavated, and the response was enthusiastic, to say the least.

[M]ore than 2,000 people, many of them office workers on their lunch break, were estimated to have joined the queue which stretched around the building in the heart of the bustling modern city. [..]

Once inside, the crowds watched archaeologists at work in a shallow pit under the Peace Hall as they try to find any last shards of bone in the moist clay of the 53 graves of adults and children unearthed last year.

I think it’s neat that they allowed public viewing of the grave site, and even neater that so many people showed up. I know I would have.

From crappy claret jug to Holy Grail in one auction

Medieval, Treasures

The auctioneers thought it was a 19th c. French claret jug with an estimated value of a couple hundred pounds. Turns out, it’s an 11th c. Fatimid rock crystal ewer, one of only 6 known in the world.

Fatimid rock crystal ewers are considered among the rarest and most valuable objects in the entire sphere of Islamic art, with only five known to exist before this extraordinary appearance. Indeed this is the first time one has ever known to have appeared at auction. The last one to surface on the market was purchased by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1862.

It ended up selling for £200,000, which is still a ridiculous bargain give its £5,000,000 market value. There’s no comment in the article about how this piece got to auction. I’m curious to know the history.

Oh, and just in case you didn’t read to the end of the article, allow me to force you:

Disaster befell the final known ewer which was from the Pitti Palace collection in Florence and had an inscription to Caliph al Hakim’s general, Husain ibn Jawhar. For many years it had been on display in the Museo degli Argenti and in 1998 it was accidentally dropped by a museum employee, shattering it irreparably.

:ohnoes:

Today in antiquities fencing news

Ancient, Looting, Roma, Caput Mundi

A bust of Marcus Aurelius that was stolen from an Algerian museum 12 years ago was pried out of Christie’s dirty little hands right before it was about to go on the block. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials returned it to the Algerian embassy this past Tuesday.

Dating from the second century, the three-foot-high, 200-pound marble sculpture depicts Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who ruled during the period when what is now Algeria was part of the Roman Empire. The marble head emerged in the international market of cultural antiquities and was spotted by INTERPOL, which alerted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that an antiquity in an auction catalogue might be a stolen artifact. ICE experts worked with Algerian scholars to verify the statue’s identity and then notified the U.S. auction house that the piece was subject to seizure. The seizure was not contested.

Yeah, I just bet it wasn’t contested. Note: Interpol was after this piece, it was stolen from a museum very recently, and it was listed in the London Art Loss Register, and yet, somehow, Christie’s was an inch away from selling it to the highest bidder.

See why I say that they’re all in on it, or at least craning their necks so far to look the other way that they might as well be in on it? There is no way these high-end auction houses with their platoons of appraisers and researchers could be so ignorant unless they meant to be.

Another interesting item from the ICE’s press release:

An 18th century colonial painting, The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, which was stolen from a church in central Mexico, was returned to Mexican authorities in August 2006 after a two-year repatriation effort involving Mexico, the U.S. Department of Justice, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. During the plundering of a church in San Juan Tepemasalco, Hidalgo, in 2000, thieves slashed the artwork from its frame, leaving tattered pieces of canvas behind. The restored artwork was acquired by the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) later that year from a private art dealer for $45,000.

What are the odds that neither major metropolitan museum nor the “private art dealer” noted anything fishy about the slashed-out-a-frame painting plundered out of a church 4 years before the sale? Best case scenario this is willful blindness.

The Euphronios krater comes home

Ancient, Looting, Roma, Caput Mundi, Social policy

One of the most celebrated Grecian vases made and signed by the ancient artist Euphronios has returned to Rome with great fanfare.

The Met has had it since 1972. It was the flagship of their ancient collection. Only problem is, it turned up at the Met with zero provenance, ie, there was no record of previous ownership.

Italy had an idea of where it came from: Cervetri, the Etruscan town just outside of Rome packed with lootalicious unexcavated tombs and the source of most known Euphronios pieces. Since there are laws against digging stuff up under cover and night and selling it to the highest bigger — laws with which the Met was familiar, hence its 3 decades of stonewalling about where the hell they got the Euphronios krater — Italy went to the mattresses to get the vase back.

Finally, they succeeded. They had to make a deal with the Met, loaning them pieces of equivalent value for a few years, but still, the krater and 60+ of his little looted friends are back in Rome now and on glorious exhibit: Nostoi: Recovered Masterpieces.

The antiquities trade is a dirty, dirty business, y’all. Everyone from the major auction houses to the snootiest super rich private collectors to the rarified curators of the greatest museums are elbow-deep in looted shit.

It’s not about colonialist Elgin-style theft from 200 years ago. We’re talking massive ongoing operations of stealing and fencing, and they’re all in on it, or at least craning their necks so far to look the other way that they might as well be in on it.

This is the first entry of a series on looting and antiquities. Watch this space for more riveting tales of filth and lucre.

Opening a Roman Coffin

Ancient, Multimedia

Wessex Archaeology is excavating a Roman burial site at Boscombe Down in Wiltshire. They filmed the opening of a sarcophagus and posted it on YouTube.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/y7yrSjG8FE8&w=430]

It’s a wonderful find, unique in the UK due to the presence of two pairs of shoes belonging to the mother and daughter interred in said coffin, and it’s great to see the excitement of the excavators when they realize what they’ve just dug up.