Month: April 2008

3,000-year-old shell jewelry on Fiji

Ancient, Treasures

Excavators on Viti Levu, Fiji’s main island, found a cache of jewelry and high-quality pottery made by the Lapita people, the earliest settlers of Fiji. The artifacts are about 3,000 year old.

Fiji Museum staffer Sepeti Matararaba found the jewelry, made from shells, under an upturned clay pot, put there by someone about 3,000 years ago. When Matararaba turned the pot over, he uncovered a cache of nine shell rings of different sizes, four shell bracelets and six necklace pieces complete with drill holes. […]

The site was likely a manufacturing center for shell jewelry and the cache a “deliberate burial of a shell jewelry collection” by the Lapita inhabitants, Nunn said.

“These are the first people in the South Pacific, they are a Stone Age people,” he said. “Within a decade or so of arriving in Fiji they were producing exquisite shell jewelry … they were producing intricately decorated pottery.”

Not only is the ancient jump in artistic skill remarkable, but after the Lapita disappeared as a distinct group around 550 B.C., Fijians stopped producing that high quality of shell jewelry and pottery altogether.

Anthropology professor Peter Shepphard thinks the decorations were the Lapita’s attempt to stay connected to their roots in the Bismarck Archipelago. Perhaps once their identity as a people faded, so did their muse.

Syria returns looted Iraqi antiquities

Ancient, Looting

Syria has returned 700 artifacts looted from Iraq in the aftermath of the US invasion and smuggled across the border.

Objects include gold jewelry, coins, daggers and clay jars. Some date from the Bronze Age and the early Islamic era.

“These objects stolen in Iraq were seized by Syrian customs officials,” Naassan-Agha said, according to the official SANA news agency, adding that other “very precious” artefacts will be returned soon.

He also urged “all the countries of the world and UNESCO to strive to return to Iraq all the antiquities which were stolen under the eyes of American occupation soldiers.”

Nice little dig there.

The first oil paintings were made in Asia, not Europe

Ancient

Afghanistan, to be precise, and painted on walls behind the giant 6th c. Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban, to be even more precise.

Although caves decorated with precious murals from 5th to 9th century A.D. also suffered from Taliban attacks on this World Heritage Site, they have since become the focus of a major discovery, revealing Buddhist oil paintings that predate those in Renaissance Europe by hundreds of years.

Scientists have proved, thanks to experiments performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, that the paints used were based of oil, hundreds of years before the technique was “invented” in Europe, when artists found they could use pigments bound with a medium of drying oil, such as linseed oil.

In many European history and art books, oil painting is said to have started in the 15th century in Europe. But the team that used the ESRF, an intense source of X rays, found the Bamiyan paintings date back to the mid-7th century AD

The paintings were made with all kinds of pigments, binders, resins, proteins, gums, varnish all layered on top of each other like a club sandwich of kickass.

Well that answers that

Ancient, Looting

Yesterday I mused in re David Cahn, the antiquities dealer who had to cough up the lekythos:

Here’s the dealer in question’s website, btw. I wonder how much of that treasure is loot.

Thanks to the prodigious memory of Looting Matters’ David Gill, my question is no longer idle.

From an article last June:

The marble statue of god Apollo, discovered in the late 19th century in the town of Gortyna in Crete, was sought by Greece ever since it was reported stolen in 1991 together with nine other items.

It was not until March this year that Interpol informed Athens it had tracked it down in Berne.

Voulgarakis said Swiss arts dealer David Cahn, who had the statue in his possession, returned it unconditionally after a brief legal dispute.

I’ll just bet he did. In case his record over the past year or so didn’t speak loud and clear, I found another interesting tidbit amongst the braggadocio on his website.

He also contributed to the catalogue of the exhibition “Glories of the Past: Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection” held at the Metropolitan Museum of New York in 1990.

Shelby White has recently had to return ten of those Glories of the Past to Italy because, wouldn’t ya know, they were looted and illegally exported. That was just the comprise, too. Italy’s original request has twenty items on it, and I seriously doubt the ten artifacts that White refused to return had legitimate provenances either.

David Cahn has a degree in Classical Archaeology. There isn’t a chance in hell he didn’t realize the muck he was wallowing in. He, much like the rest of his colleagues and clients, simply chose to look the other way until the law forced them to do otherwise.

Ancient lekythos returned to Greece

Ancient, Looting, Treasures

A marble lekythos (a tall vase used to hold oil) dating to the 4th century B.C. and inscribed with a funerary scene was returned to Greece April 17th. It had been in the (indubitably grubby) hands of a Swiss antiquities dealer, surprise, surprise.

It is a funerary lekythos depicting a farewell banquet for the deceased, in a classic farewell scene. It was presented at an international antiquities dealers exhibition in 2007 in Maastricht, where it was put up for auction by a Swiss antiquities dealer.

Detail of funerary inscriptionAfter a series of negotiations, the Swiss dealer decided to hand over the lekythos to the Greek government in an out-of-court settlement, without reservations or conditions. It was delivered to a representative of the Greek embassy in Berne and then crated in the customs free zone in Basel before being transported to Greece.

That’s actually a rather notable feat. Switzerland has been a central staging ground for antiquities dealers to hold looted and stolen artifacts before sale because it has no laws against importing illegally exported goods.

Last May, however, the Swiss and Greek governments signed an agreement requiring both countries to actively seek out illegally exported antiquities and repatriate them.

Here’s the dealer in question’s website, btw. I wonder how much of that treasure is loot.