Peek-a-boo!

If you came to this blog page through a search engine looking for the chic Alpine skier of yore, Picabo (pronunced peek-a-boo) Street, I'm sorry to disappoint you. But, feel free to stick around and play a little Cultural Property Slalom :-) Navigating the deaks and the dives of cultural property management can be almost as challenging as an Olympic course sometimes. It's sort of like the race committee hiding the gates and laughing as skiers careen back and forth in a frantic search for some logical path. The race committee is, in this case, the U.S. State Department's Cultural Heritage Center and the cultural property nationalists who support, indeed help to mold, their ideological view.

Hiding the gates is a slightly more sophisticated version of hiding the ball. But before we get all wrapped up in metaphorical doublespeak, let's just focus on the word "hiding". Some of my readers will undoubtedly remember as a young child playing peek-a-boo. The object was, naively, to avoid being seen. As long as one's eyes were covered, that person became invisible. Until, of course, the barrier was abruptly removed and up popped a Cheshire Cat grin and the popular verbal expression. The processing of requests from China and Cyprus for import restriction reminded me of this child-like game. DOS never did tell the American people if China had asked for import restrictions on coins. They hid the request itself behind a bureaucratic stone wall that not even Congressmen and Senators could break down. Oddly, Ronald Reagan is often credited with tearing down the Berlin Wall, but nobody in Washington seems willing to touch that little stone fence in Foggy Bottom. Yes, bipartisan interest from several Senators did slow down DOS action for a while, but once the attention of legislators was diverted to other issues it was time for peek-a-boo and out came a Memorandum of Understanding.

When the MOU on cultural property from Cyprus

came around for renewal, the numismatic community asked DOS point blank if there had been any request from Cyprus to add ancient coins, which in the original MOU had been exempted from import restrictions. The reply from DOS was that they did not anticipate adding coins. At the scheduled hearing of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee on this issue, it was peek-a-boo time again as DOS announced that a "last minute" request from the government of Cyprus had been recognized and coins were indeed to be considered. Although that august committee ultimately recommended that the exemption for coins be continued, DOS was still playing peek-a-boo and overrode the CPAC committee by adding coins to the MOU anyway.

In the midst of a sea of proclamations about the need for governmental transparency, both here and abroad, the Executive Department of the U.S. Government cannot, it seems, keep its own family in line. DOS is notorious for withholding even the most mundane of information and will fight for that prerogative in court. Why? It seems to me, that it is pervasive in the mentality of the people who develop policies and programs within that fiefdom. That mentality is influenced mainly by leaders, and their protégés, of the academic archaeological community. These activists are not above playing the game themselves. Playing peek-a-boo is a talent that some people seem to cultivate as a professional tool. One of the interesting things about the internet, and its blogs, is that one can rarely hide. I can, for example, analyze the traffic to this blog on a daily basis and see who visits, how many and which pages they read, and see the process that they used to get here. No, I don't have any super-sleuth software, nor any particular technical ability. It's a feature that is available, free of charge, on any blog or any web page for that matter. In one of my recent forays into the statistical world, I noted several visits from one intriguing source.

It was a series of visits from Yale University, redirected through a service that purports to hide one's identity. The name of the service is somewhat mis-appropriately "hidemyass.com". Well, sorry to say, it doesn't. Now, granted, there are a lot of people at Yale but I don't know very many of them, and fewer yet who would try to hide their presence from me. It really does remind me of my childhood.

Peek-a-boo!

Its about control

Dr. Zahi Hawass, the incorrigible Grand Poobah of Egyptian Archaeology is in London this week saber rattling about getting the Rosetta Stone back. In a point/counterpoint interview on BBC radio, Dr. Hawass reminded Roy Clare (Chief Executive of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council) that a tiff with the Louvre in France led to French archaeologists being ejected from an ongoing dig in Egypt. The Louvre subsequently acquiesced to the demands of Hawass for return of five paintings that Egypt wanted repatriated. After bringing up that point, Dr. Hawass was suspiciously quick to deny that he was threatening the British Museum. While Mr. Clare argued the merit of culture and its objects as a global interest, the position of Egypt's chief culture czar was simple, "It's part of Egypt's culture only." And, they want it back.

Major artifacts like the Rosetta Stone or the Parthenon Sculptures are perhaps worth a little hostile rhetoric in the ageless battle over national symbols, but what do upcoming young nationalists cut their eye-teeth on? No aspiring young archaeologist or bureaucrat is going to get a word in edgewise in the main arena. Fortunately for them, there are lesser objects to focus on. In fact, "protecting" the most useless piece of broken pottery can turn an idealist into a zealot. A couple years ago, the Italian ministry of tourism ran an advertisement inviting tourists to visit the many archaeological sites in Italy. The ad showed a young man and woman holding a small broken piece of ancient pottery—all abeam at having found this object on the ground. The advertisement led to an uproar among archaeologists who felt it sent the wrong message. That message, presumably, was that tourists shouldn't touch broken potsherds.

Having lived in Turkey and Greece, and traveled extensively in both countries, I can state without any doubt in my mind that there are more potsherds there than there are fish in the ocean. One can't walk on any unpaved surface without seeing broken pottery. I've seen roadbeds in Turkey where the fill used to build up the road base itself was simply littered with ancient potsherds gathered and deposited by huge earth movers and crushed by a constant stream of cars, trucks and horse-carts. Some of the fragments are painted, some are incised, but God forbid any inquisitive individual should pick one up and look at it, much less put it in their pocket. The fact of the matter is that nobody in Turkey would pay the slightest attention to someone pickup up ancient potsherds, but the thought alone is enough to send some radical academics into a tizzy. It's not the loss of context that is the issue, there isn't any context to lose, it's the prospect of losing complete and absolute control that raises the hackles of a cultural property nationalist.

It's a lust for control that pits many young idealists against private collectors and the associated antiquities trade. They routinely claim that it's only "illicit" antiquities that they oppose, but then define illicit as anything lacking their self-imposed standard of documentation. In effect, they have characterized the lion's share of all privately owned antiquities as illicit—not through any law, nor compiled evidence, but through their myopic ideology. Consequently, while Zahi Hawass is in London charging that the Rosetta Stone was stolen from Egypt, a troop of Zahi Wannabees are busily vilifying collectors of some of the most innocuous objects ever created by man. Can it really be about context and loss of information? That's a catchy sound bite, but looting is the smallest part of archaeological site destruction. Dams and bulldozers destroy far more archaeological material every year than the antiquities market has ever seen. Archaeologists themselves have been responsible for huge losses of data and material both during and after excavations. The challenge has never really been about context, it has always been about control. Everybody, it seems, wants to be a Zahi Hawass.

A Matter of Aesthetics

A 90-year-old Virginia Medal of Honor winner and veteran of WWII and Vietnam has been ordered to remove the flag pole from his front yard because it does not conform "aesthetically" to the standards of the homeowners association where he lives. They want the most highly decorated combat soldier alive to fly his flag from a wall mount. The story is covered by WTVR.com out of Richmond.

http://www.wtvr.com/news/wtvr-veteran-flagpole,0,2550197.story

In the first day of posting, more than 3,000 comments have been appended to the article and the issue is gaining national attention.