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eventual return to their homeland in relation to Iraqi antiquities, from an academic
writing in the United States, who must therefore share some measure of responsibility
for the events in question, I μnd deeply disturbing. And I say so in the disagreeable
awareness that writing as a British academic I share that responsibility. But certainly I
would not use the astonishing maladministration associated with those unfortunate
events as an argument against the restitution of the antiquities whose looting was
their immediate consequence. But her essay has a more general ·aw. She does not
su¸ciently distinguish between the issue of antiquities looted after 1970 (the year of
the UNESCO Convention) and those looted many years, perhaps decades, before. A
key argument for rigour in the application of due diligence with antiquities appearing
on the market since 1970 lies in the reduction in the scale of current and future looting
which an embargo on such clandestine tra¸c might bring. The restitution argument
as it applies to earlier appropriations, these having rarely been clandestine and indeed
sometimes undertaken before antiquities laws were in place, is a di¶erent one. There is
no merit in eliding the two, as O’Connell does.
Such debates continue, and will no doubt do so for some time to come. But there
are encouraging signs, at least for this reviewer, that the tide is turning. One is the
decision by the Getty Museum, little noticed in the continuing furore about the return
of antiquities and the Rome trial, to adopt a rigorous and ethical acquisitions code in
line with that of the AIA or the British Museum (or indeed the UK’s Ministry of
Culture, Media and Sport) and observing the 1970 Rule. Here the Getty now joins
those international museums which have published a well-deμned acquisitions policy.
One profoundly hopes that they will soon be joined by the Metropolitan Museum
with its new Director, following the retirement of his antediluvian predecessor. It is
surely signiμcant that the Association of Art Museum Directors has, as noted above,
recently recommended observance of the 1970 Rule. This book, therefore, is a very
timely one. By its willingness to give a voice to a wide range of opinions and its steady
focus upon the key issues, it may itself prove in·uential in the ongoing debate.
University of Cambridge COLIN RENFREW
acr10@cam.ac.uk
MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
Cuno (J.) Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle over our
Ancient Heritage. Pp. xl + 228, ills. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2008. Cased, £14.95, US$24.95. ISBN:
978-0-691-13712-4.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X09001176
The author of this slim study is currently President and Director of the Art Institute
of Chicago, which gives an excellent idea of where the arguments put forward here are
rooted. At face value this study is a polemic against those who would prevent
museums like the Art Institute or, for that matter, the British Museum, museums that
the author terms ‘Encyclopedic’ in their scope and coverage of past human cultures,
adding to their collections. C. is persuasive about the value of the Encyclopaedic
museum as a means to foster appreciation of human diversity, and few would argue
with him. It is developed eloquently in the preface, in which we are presented with six
loosely linked antiquities in Chicago whose ‘life stories’ are told in some detail. The
punch line is that museums like the Art Institute increasingly μnd it impossible to
The Classical Review vol. 59 no. 2 © The Classical Association 2009; all rights reserved
576 the classical review
collect such antiquities and present them for their visitors because of international
conventions restricting the trade in antiquities. This is in contrast to the past, largely
pre-Second World War days, when non-national teams were allowed to take back to
their own countries a proportion of the material that they had excavated, a process
known as ‘partage’.
The responsibility for this position lies, C. contends, with archaeologists as well as
with those who draw up the international treaties that govern such trade. C. argues
that these treaties, initiated by non-governmental bodies such as UNESCO in
collaboration with national governments, misdirect the impact of laws on antiquities
away from the protection of archaeological sites and towards the protection of
narrow, selμsh, national interests. C. also points out that treaties have failed to prevent
such catastrophes as the looting of the Baghdad museum. Had non-national archae-
ologists been allowed to take a proportion of the material that they had excavated
away from the country, then more would have survived the wreck. Archaeologists aid
and abet such practices under the misguided belief that laws like these prevent the
looting of archaeological sites. To prove the point, C. focusses on China and Turkey
(with side-swipes at Italy). These targets are chosen to demonstrate ‘how the cultural
property laws of Turkey and China are embedded in the politics of modern nation
building, and the consequences of this for the practice of archaeology in these
countries’ (p. 67).
Turkey’s error is to be a new national state that is alleged to be using its archaeo-
logical remains selectively, constructing an identity from those elements that it wishes
to put forward as being part of its national history while ignoring those that are not.
C. notes the neglect of the Kurds and, for that matter, the Greek-speaking peoples of
Turkey who were largely forced out after the First World War to settle in Greece. The
Chinese chapter focusses on similar concerns, using the archaeology of the Buddhist
caves at Magao within the Xinjiang region of western China, home of the Uighur
people, as its primary case study. As with the Kurds, these people are not ethnically
Chinese and have not always been under direct Chinese rule. In a long and detailed
account we are told of foreign expeditions that travelled to this remote region at the
turn of the last century to retrieve religious writings and all manner of artefacts to
transport then back to ‘encyclopedic’ museums in their home countries. ‘All removed
local materials to faraway places for the beneμt of others’ (p. 116). Nowadays all this
is impossible, because the Chinese ‘nationalist retentionist cultural property laws,
while said to be aimed at protecting archaeological sites … are really intended to keep
cultural heritage within the borders of the nation within which such property is
found. They are national and nationalist laws’ (sic; p. 117). C. then sums up this
chapter by posing the question ‘how wide and deep do these [Chinese] roots go?’
(p. 120). How can the whole of the archaeology of China’s past be deemed to be
Chinese?
At this point readers may well be focussing on some issues of their own. How can an
American have the chutzpah to talk about the neglect of native cultures when his own
state has been guilty of near genocide of its own aboriginal population? That was
compounded too by the most extreme forms of cultural suppression (until, that is, they
were safely extinct, at which point it became possible to welcome the ‘noble savage’
back into the realms of academe and art appreciation). China, the oldest nation state in
existence, has been through enormous change in its long history, yet archaeology has
found forms of writing, religious belief and cultural practice that are recognisably
Chinese dating back millennia. If anyone has a right to retain their archaeology for
their museums, the Chinese do. Of course nations use their archaeology selectively to
the classical review 577
construct their past: it’s how humans have always dealt with the questions ‘who are we?’
and ‘where do we come from?’ This is a chimerical target with fabricated villains which
ignores a rather more important and uncomfortable truth not covered in this book at
all. The real enemy is the antiques trade and those collectors who will stop at nothing to
build a collection and then pass it on, perhaps to a museum, on their demise. Without
these people, there would be less looting of archaeological sites, and little need for
regulation. It is the antiques market that drives looting, and without legislation
unscrupulous museum curators would still be collecting artefacts and displaying them
with that conscience-salving and convenient μg-leaf ‘unprovenanced’. Who owns
antiquity? The person (or museum) with the most money.
Ironbridge Institute, University of Birmingham ROGER WHITE
r.h.white@bham.ac.uk
MINOANS GO HOME?
Berg (I.) Negotiating Island Identities. The Active Use of Pottery in
the Middle and Late Bronze Age Cyclades. (Gorgias Dissertations 31.)
Pp. xxvi + 224, ills, maps. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007. Cased,
US$102. ISBN: 978-1-59333-725-4.
doi:10.1017/S0009840X09001188
Since the early 1900s scholars have tried to explain the phenomenon of
‘Minoanisation’, that is the processes that underlay the discovery of many aspects of
material culture in various Aegean regions (from the Peloponnese to the Western
coast of Anatolia), which ultimately originated from ‘Minoan’ Crete and are
especially visible in the period c. 1700–1500 B.C. Early pioneers of Aegean
archaeology (e.g. Evans) were quick to connect the archaeological evidence with the
writings of ancient Greek historians (especially Thucydides) and the notion of a
‘Minoan thalassocracy’. Although this view still has some die-hard supporters, since
the 1950s more nuanced and contrasting interpretations have come to the fore, largely
(but not exclusively) through the impact of post-colonial interpretations.
B.’s volume, which derives from her doctoral dissertation (2000), o¶ers a
contribution to the debate on ‘Minoanisation’ and to the larger μeld of ‘island’
literature, promising a fresh outlook on both: concerning the former, she maintains
that the inhabitants of the Cycladic islands in the Bronze Age were not the passive
recipients of a superior Minoan culture, merely reacting to external in·uences (p. xvi),
and in terms of the latter, she aims to undermine the ‘common notion of islands as
isolated, essentially self-su¸cient, and consequently peripheral units’ (p. xiv). One
does wonder, however, how many scholars would nowadays support the idea that all
islands are isolated, self-su¸cient and inward-looking, given that interaction is often
the key to their populations’ survival; similarly, few would consider the Cycladic
islanders as merely passive beneμciaries of Minoan enlightenment, let alone believe
that ‘Minoanisation’was the result of a single homogeneous process.
The book begins with a historical overview of the Cyclades, starting from their
exploitation for resources (e.g. obsidian) in the Palaeolithic and ending with the early
Late Bronze Age, focussing on the varied nature of interactions throughout this long
period.
The second chapter, ‘Aspects of Cycladic Island Life’, sets the scene in its physical
surroundings, by dealing with such environmental factors as sea-level changes,
The Classical Review vol. 59 no. 2 © The Classical Association 2009; all rights reserved
578 the classical review
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