“This book is about the underbelly of archaeology, from both a personal and a global perspective. It is a firsthand exploration into the many reasons we loot. To loot is to freely take something that is not yours. There are night diggers pillaging tombs and rioters with bats and crowbars pouring through the unhinged doors of the National Museum in Iraq. There are scientists who say it is looting when artifacts come without paperwork. Museum curators have called it looting when repatriation laws require them to turn over prized pieces of antiquity to faraway countries demanding their heritage back. Fingers seem to all be pointing at each other.”
“Why so much contention? We are dealing with the physical remains of all of human history. What one person takes often destroys it for another, a big gamble when we are here for such a short time, one thin layer of generations atop thousands of years of ancestry. What we do now forever changes the context of artifacts. Some see the fight over who should be able to own the physical past as a war. In order for an artifact to sit on a dealer’s shelf, it must often be laundered beyond scientific recognition, the bane of archaeologists. In order for it to be in the hands of science, it is often secreted away into storage where it may never be seen again. In between are many hands scrabbling for whatever they can get.”
“In many museums you move from one artifact to the next, and they all bear such secret stories. They are there for the sake of posterity, which, right now, is you. Enjoy.”
“What we really want from archaeology is not a debate over who owns what, but a meaningful, tangible connection to people who came long before us. We are looking for our place in time, a temporal context for our own civilization and our very lives.”
“The general cutoff for archaeology is sixty years. Before that, it is trash, after that, an artifact. In a way, this is an arbitrary line, but sixty years is about the time when objects begin to fade from living memory. Even ugly things become beautiful after sixty years. What may have once been commonplace becomes rare. A forgotten vessel, such as a bottle or a jar, turns into a time machine. A piece of glass or pottery opens a keyhole to look through.”
“In situ, an object is far more than just itself. It becomes the horizon and the whole sky, and the occasional whip of a breeze where my father and I would walk, stopping along the way to peer back through time. The past becomes an entire landscape, a country.”
“These objects are calling cards from home landscapes. When they are removed, the markers of those places are lost. We look down to see who has been here before us, the knowledge not simply for our own edification but for a transmission from the past, a voice for those who once occupied this land. When we look down and they are gone, so are the people.”
“Year by year our possessions vanish. We lose the bows and arrows, the buffalo coins, the rotary telephones. Only a select, sometimes accidental few make it through the breach, and those few take on meaning from the stories they carry.”
“I have paused in museums at ancient religious sculptures with their lips and feet worn away from centuries of being kissed and knew that if I leaned too close, an alarm would sound or a guard would stop me, and for good reason. We would kiss these things out of existence. There are so many of us now that we threaten to devour the world with all our touching, starting with the things we adore most. At the same time, we obviously yearn for contact, and I fear what would happen if we were cut off from a distinctive, on-the-ground relationship with the past.”
“Yes, we were a band of smelly yahoos, but we had a point. You start getting an eye, and the land opens up. If you had such a skill, would you not wander through the world peering at the history beneath your feet?”
Field archaeologist Glade Hadden: “For me, the thrill of discovery is the juice. I get that juice once with each artifact I find. If I take it with me, it doesn’t add to the thrill of the finding, and if I leave it there it doesn’t take away from the thrill of finding. It does, however, give someone else the possibility of the same joy of finding. And, truthfully? I feel better about myself when I leave it behind. Maybe some perverse form of ego reinforcement, but hey—it works, it leaves things intact, something that’s becoming more and more rare.”
“Like so many others, archaeologists have proclaimed themselves as rightful stewards and recipients of the past. And also like so many others, they value their treasures for unique reasons. It used to be more about big finds, statues and manuscripts. Now it is about everything. Information is treasure—not the object alone, but the way it fits into the larger fabric of its context. If it is touched by someone else (even another archaeologist of less propriety), if it is moved, altered, taken, or destroyed, the larger picture becomes unrecoverable. Archaeologists rely on eighth-inch strata, reflections of X-rays, and the arrangement of isotopes. Was the artifact found in a ceremonial setting, a kitchen, or a grave? Was it left randomly along a trail or placed in a special room? … Science has become ever more delicate, requiring virgin context, which puts archaeologists at extreme odds with modern collectors who are not so concerned with provenance, or pothunters who dig at will.”
“Archaeology is like getting into people’s closets, or finding what is lost under the couch, all the dirty little secrets. What hammers did ancient people use, what soup bowls and fire starters? Where did they give birth, and in what holes did they shit (entire master’s degrees are spent on desiccated chubs of ancient human feces). Everything must be known, down to nips of charcoal, strands of old cloth, and gnawed rat bones. From these, the past is reconstructed, as if to remind us in agonizing detail that we are not the only people who ever lived.”
Glade Hadden: “I don’t take things anymore unless I have to, if it’s at obvious risk of being destroyed. The argument ‘if we don’t take it somebody else will’ doesn’t work for me. If you’re really a scientist, why would you need to possess the object itself? It’s just an object. It’s just stuff. For what archaeologists purport themselves to be, all they really need is context. After that you’re just a collector.”
“Where should artifacts go? Is one place better than another, or is each a mere stopover along the well-traveled itinerary of these things? My own preference is that if they cannot remain in situ, they are best curated where they can hold on to as much of their original context as possible.”
“We move these things around like charms, and the more of the past they contain, the more powerful they become for us.”
“This is what happens to collections. They eventually fly apart. They are held as long as possible, but the owner’s grip loosens. It is a principal dilemma of archaeology. Objects so much older than ourselves are bound to outlive our fascinations. Author Ernest Becker, in his book Denial of Death, proposed the notion of “immortality projects.” According to Becker, these projects are what we create to outlast what he sees as the meaninglessness of our own deaths. Politics, philosophies, institutions, statues, anything we can pull together that will live longer than we do, are a bid for a kind of immortality. Artifact collections perfectly fit the bill. They are a way of reaching far beyond our era, into both the past and the future.”
“One of the world’s great collectors, George Ortiz, describes how and why he is affected by antiquities: “The vision of certain objects struck me viscerally, then they came to fascinate and move me, I let them speak to me, I let their content and spirit nourish me.” In this sense, the love for artifacts is about the object itself and what it emotionally conveys. This is what rankles many scholars and archaeologists, that the object is seen as art, with no real need for detailed social, cultural, or geographic context. Collectors go more by feel. What they feel is historicity. Historicity means historical authenticity. It is a quality that objects possess, the difference between last night’s bottle cap and a medallion carried around the neck of a conquistador. When a thing has seen centuries, it builds up historicity.”
“The question of whether private collections should be allowed is almost irrelevant. While they are often crimes of degrees, a matter of steps from ransacked archaeological sites, they are not going away. Ancient things have always moved from hand to hand. They do not belong to a black-and-white ethic, rather they are part of the myriad relationships that arise from our fascination with the past and its objects. These artifacts do not merely serve our wide-ranging purposes. They manipulate us as well.”
“It matters where things are; stories are told differently as they get shuffled from one place to another. A statue in a museum guarded by a motion detector is not that same statue in a shrine with its feet being kissed off. Moving it under a roof may give us a new past to revel in, but at least consider the equal and opposite reaction: what has happened to the thing that has been lost?”
“It is a different experience to know you are in the original location. The air feels charged. Maybe it is historicity, all in the mind, but the mind makes it real. Like the Jowo Shakymuni or the Cadboll Stone, objects take on a unique power when they are in situ.”
“There is something to be said for letting things stay in situ as long as they possibly can, even if it means that a hunter might show up tomorrow and take them, or that they are swallowed by weather. We have no choice but to live among contradictions. If anyone tells you there is only one right answer to the conundrum of archaeology, he is trying to sell you something. At this point, considering all that has been removed, it is worth leaving the last pieces where they lie. As for what is already out of the ground, by all means, move it around, whether you repatriate it or pass it on to the next collector. … Let us at least appreciate all that has been gathered, and for the rest, let it lie.”
“Time was never meant to last. It couldn’t. It has no shape. It threads through your fingers like water, no stopping it for any longer than you can cup your palm. Beyond the small memories of our generations, there are artifacts, the substance of history. Though there is a beauty to letting it go, opening your hand and letting time spill out, I am not immune to a desire that seems to be human through and through: grab something from the past and hang on to it as if it were all there ever was. One cannot fault the desires we have to hold on to these artifacts. But having every last one is overkill.”