FORUM
Current editorial | Previous editorials
The Forum is an opportunity for readers to interact with the magazine on the major issues confronting the tribal arts community. To participate in an ongoing discussion of these and other topics, go to the Letters section.
The Editorial of our Spring 2001 issue.
On February 15 the National Geographic Society released the information that three important early Moche tombs had been discovered. These new finds have been excavated over a period of three years by a team of archaeologists headed by Christopher Donnan, an anthropology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. The site, a large pyramid at Dos Cabezas, is located on the Peruvian coast some forty miles south of the noted tombs of Sipán, which Donnan also helped excavate in 1988. Unlike Sipán, the tombs at Dos Cabezas were unlooted and contained a wealth of remarkable early Moche ceramics, metalwork, and jewelry.
As exciting as the artifacts is the wealth of information about early Moche cultural, religious, and burial practices that Donnan's team was able to bring to light in the process of their controlled scientific excavation. Of the more than 350 Moche burials that have been examined using archaeological methodology, only a handful have contained artifacts of precious metal. Yet Moche goldwork is not exactly rare. A look at any major auction catalogue of Pre-Columbian art, to take but one example, will generally reveal a piece or two, which likely came into the market place from the unsystematic excavation of sites sometime in the past. Scholars, dealers, and private collectors of antiquities have long held sharply divided opinions about the appropriate disposition of material that is currently being offered for sale in the United States and Europe, but few if any who truly love the field would condone practices that lead to the further destruction of the archaeological record by clandestine excavations.
The Society for American Archaeology (SAA), an international professional organization of some 6,600 members, pointedly opposes all looting of sites and the purchase and sale of looted archaeological materials. The SAA recently identified what it perceives to be a serious new threat to the world's archaeological record in the rapid expansion of marketing on the Internet. In July of last year Keith Kintigh, then president of SAA, sent a letter to amazon.com requesting that it put an end to the sale of archaeological materials on its online auction site.The text of his well-reasoned letter can be found at www.saa.org/Goverment/amazon.html.
Similar letters were sent to eBay and other major internet auction sites. Kintigh's fear was that the vastly increased exposure of such material on the Internet would lead to vastly increased demand and thus an increase in looting activities. He notes that "the Internet sale of antiquities has noticeably exacerbated the already-severe problems created by the market for antiquities." According to Donald Craib, counsel for SAA, the two largest online auction sites, amazon and eBay, had not responded to Kintigh's request at the time this column was composed. Both sites have policies forbidding the sale of items prohibited by applicable law, but in this case a more active stance is called for. Both identify categories of objects forbidden to be offered, and-to the degree to which it is possible-sales featuring these items are deleted. These include firearms, alcohol, stolen property, tobacco (in the case of eBay), and pornography (in the case of amazon). "Artifacts" are currently relegated by eBay to a category called "Questionable," a place it shares with "Used Clothing" and "Batteries." Amazon does not appear to address the issue as specifically. It should be noted the policies defining these standards are not particularly easy to find on either site, although the "Antiquities" section of eBay (3,590 items when sampled at the time of writing) and the "Ancient World" section of amazon (1,750 items) are readily accessible. We urge these and other online sales organizations to respond to Kintigh's concerns by placing tighter controls on the antiquities that are offered on their sites. While we believe that cultural benefits exist as a result of the market for antiquities, we can only concur with the SAA that putting such objects forth in the largely unregulated forum that is the Internet can only result in further destruction of the already fragile record of ancient human history.
Jonathan Fogel