She was looted from Baghdad’s Iraq Museum in April of 2003, along with thousands more artifacts from the Cradle of Civilization, 10,000 of which have yet to be recovered.
On a tip, Iraqi police and US troops found her buried in 6 inches of mud in someone’s garden, entirely unharmed.
Now on to the find the rest of the missing. Here’s hoping the authorities get at least 10,000 more dead-on accurate anonymous tips.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. traces the genealogy of more famous (and one non-famous) black people in African American Lives 2 on PBS. I watched the first series last year and was riveted by his exploration of the documentary record and DNA to uncover the family histories of people like Oprah Winfrey and Quincy Jones.
The second series premiered last Wednesday. Check your local listings to find a replay of the first 2 hours and don’t miss the last 2 hours this Wednesday. It’s fascinating stuff and deeply affecting.
See the impact on Chris Rock when he discovers his great-great grandfather Julius Caesar Tingman fought for the Union after 21 years as a slave in this clip. Now multiply that times 12 to get a sense of how amazing this program is.
In a bit of a break with the traditional direction of these things, yesterday Greece returned two ancient statues of Artemis and Apollo that had been stolen from an Albanian museum in 1991.
The headless marble statues, one dating back to the 2nd century B.C. and the other to the 2nd century A.D., were handed to Albanian Culture Minister Ylli Pango in Athens today. They were recovered by the Greek authorities in 1997 and identified [6 years later] as having been stolen from the Butrint archaeological site in 1991.
The ceremony was heavily laden with commentary about the propriety of returning cultural patrimony to its rightful owner, and was held in the brand spanking new Acropolis Museum which just happens to have a place set aside for the Elgin Marbles should hell frieze over.
Active duty helicopter pilot Edward Earle Johnson was charged today with selling 80 antiques stolen from the Ma’adi Museum outside of Cairo.
On September 29, 2002, 370 pre-dynastic artifacts ranging in date from 3,000 to 5,000 BC were stolen from the Ma’adi Museum. Chief Warrant Officer Johnson was deployed to Cairo from February to October of 2002.
In January of 2003, Johnson contacted a Texas art dealer offering to sell him a group of Egyptian antiquities that he claimed he had inherited from his grandfather who had acquired them in Egypt during the 30’s or 40’s. Bummer about him not having a sliver of documentation to support this provenance, of course, but why should that stop an art dealer from buying 90 5,000 year-old Egyptian artifacts for the bargain basement price of $20,000?
Nor, heaven forfend, should the unsupported fiction inhibit Christie’s and a bunch of other galleries and collectors in New York, London, Zurich, etc. from purchasing some of the pieces from the dealer, a dealer later discovered by the feds to be an associate of Sotheby’s.
As of January, the feds had recovered 80 of the 90 artifacts Johnson sold. Who knows where the other 260 antiquities stolen from the museum have ended up. Johnson hasn’t been charged with the theft, just with the sale, so that means the feds don’t have much in the way of prosecutable evidence on who actually did the stealing.
God, the antiquities trade is so dirty I could just spit.
Yes, that’s right: free. The only other online program in archaeology I know of is the University of Leicester’s distance learning courses, and they’re both far more complex — book purchases, homework and final exams are involved — and far from free.
National Park Service Archeology Program, however, is easily accessible, entirely online, limited in scope to the ways and means of caring for archaeological collections, aka curating.
Much more broadly, this technical assistance is designed for the global archeological community — professional archeologists (e.g., university professors, CRM principal investigators and their staff, federal, tribal, and state agency staff), graduate students, upper level college students, and others concerned about archeological collections — who are rarely taught this material in formal educational settings. Because “Managing Archeological Collections” is created for primary access and use via the Internet, “global” is a key word here.
Cool, huh? Needless to say, I’m taking it. And even more needless to say, I’ll post all about it, especially the ethics sections. I have high hopes that a program by the NPS will take a firm stance on provenance issues, given how often looters target national parks for devastation in the name of profit.
