Delinquency

I know, I know, I start this new exciting blog and then promptly go on vacation for almost two weeks (and take a week to recover). And it's a shame, really, because the first 4 days of that "vacation" were actually archaeology-related. I went to the AIA conference in Philadelphia, where I interviewed with graduate schools, voted on AIA resolutions at the Council meeting, drank more than I should have, and discovered Philadelphia might not be the worst place in the world to spend 5-7 years of my life. I had a mental list going of blog-related topics from that weekend, too. I'll save them up for a later date, when I lack other inspiration.

But not today! Because today, as I was eating my breakfast cereal, I heard on Morning Edition a crazy story about Ohio and Kentucky feuding over a rock with some graffiti on it (dating back to at least 1847, when an "archaeological publication" noted it). Essentially, some guy decided it would be fun to try to find this rock, which had been underwater since the 1920s, when the Ohio River was dammed. So he and a buddy went out scuba-diving, found it, hauled it to the surface, and offered it to the local (Ohio) museum. Eventually Kentucky found out, and now they are raising a stink about the rock belonging to them, since it was an antiquity registered in Kentucky (having, presumably, been on the Kentucky side of the river before it was submerged). The original guy and his buddy are also facing charges because they illegally moved an antiquity.

There are so many convoluted issues in this story, I am forced to make a list to keep track of them all.

1. What the heck is the archaeological significance of this rock anyway??? The story doesn't say anything about who made it, when, what's inscribed on it (other than a face that "looks like Charlie Brown"), or any other bit of information that would tell us why we should care. This is why people don't understand what's so wrong about removing an object from it's in situ location, and why it is against the law to do so.
2. I'm sure some people care about legal disputes and state's jurisdiction, etc. I'm not one of them.
   
3. A major problem in China right now is that with the building of the Three Gorges Dam, tons of ancient sites are being covered up. Conveniently for China, a lot of those sites are thought to have associations with non-ethnically Chinese people who lived in the region and might make a territorial claim to the land based on ancestry. Damming of the Nile has also destroyed many sites in Egypt. Damming = bad for archaeology and site preservation.
4. Now I'm looking more closely at the face image, and it seems to have the year 1856 inscribed in it. Does something just over 150 years old count as an antiquity or not? Where do we place that line, both ethically and legally?
5. Is it actually wrong - ethically - to have moved this rock and brought it to a place where people can see and study it? (If it warrants either of those things - I'm still not convinced.)
   
6. Other thoughts? I know there's more!
   

Opinion-Editorial

My advisor asked our class to write a preliminary Op-Ed piece, to be published in April around the time of the anniversary of the Baghdad Museum looting. We're going to meet throughout spring to solidify our message and what point(s) we really want to make. Here's my submission - certainly preliminary, but I spent a solid few hours this morning working on it, so I'm sharing:

What is Looting?
I/We participated in a class at the University of Minnesota last fall titled “Who Owns the Past?” The course brought together diverse perspectives of law and archaeology. Most of we archaeologists entered the class believing that tragedies such as the thefts of antiquities from the Baghdad Museum and the ongoing disruption of archaeological sites in Iraq should be prosecuted and punished under a legal system. Tougher laws and penalties for dealers and buyers would prevent objects from museums and sites in Iraq from disappearing from public view and scientific study.

One constant discussion point in our course was to define “looting,” commonly described as illegal excavation. In the United States, if you find an arrowhead on your land, you can keep or sell it as you wish. For the law students in our class, that was a sufficient answer – no law, no problem! But many countries, including China, Israel, Egypt, Italy, Greece, and Iraq, do have laws to regulate antiquities. Any object in the ground belongs to the state, not the person on whose property it was found.

Most such laws were passed and continue to be enforced in order to protect archaeological sites. Archaeologists interpret and date objects by associating them with things found with them. This is called “context,” and identifying and documenting every object’s context is the foundation for modern archaeology. For example, a coin of the Alexander the Great found next to a drinking cup means that cup most likely also dates to the time of Alexander. If an archaeologist finds the cup and coin on the floor of a house with elaborate painted walls, they can say that the cup was used for dining. But if instead they are found in a temple, surrounded by ash, it is more likely that the cup had a ritual or religious use. If our hypothetical cup was found in Egypt, but the clay used to make it came from the island of Rhodes, we can infer something about trade patterns and economic exchange. And so on.

Now, say instead of being found in an archaeological excavation, our drinking cup was found by a farmer tilling his field. He’s a little short on money in tough economic times, so he takes it to his local black market antiquities dealer, to whom he sells it for one day’s worth of wages. Many, many deals later, the cup shows up for auction at Christie’s in New York, where it is described as “Fourth Century BC, Eastern Mediterranean.” (Information which, by the way, is based on our hypothetical cup’s similarities to other cups found during scientific archaeological excavations.) It has been completely divorced from its original, irreplaceable context, and it will now be able to add little to our collective knowledge about the past.

So is removing an object from its archaeological context still “looting” if it’s legal, as it is in the United States and Great Britain? What if we change our definition from “illegal excavation” to “undocumented excavation”? After all, the problem with looting is that it destroys the original archaeological context of an artifact. The trouble with looting is that it forever destroys the information about an object which can be gained from context. Destruction of archaeological sites is tantamount to burning books, only no other copies exist.

What I/we came to realize last fall is that looting is not a legal problem, so it doesn’t have a legal solution. Archaeologists wish to gain, preserve and protect knowledge about people who lived before us. The best way to do that is not with laws, but information. Several members of our class have become more involved in non-profit organizations which help protect sites, such as Saving Antiquities For Everyone (http://www.savingantiquities.org/) or the Archaeological Institute of America (http://www.archaeological.org/). Together, we can ensure that our past has a future.

Takes a licking and keeps on ticking

400 year old miniature Swiss watch found in China?

It's difficult to say what is more surprising about this little news story: that an apparently modern object was found in an ancient context, or that China actually let people know about it.

This seems like as good a time as any to discuss the title of this blog, In Situ. The phrase is Latin for "in place" and is used in archaeology to describe something which is in its primary context. For example, the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis is in situ, but its sculptural adornments spirited away to the British Musuem in the early ninteenth century by Lord Elgin are not. If a volcano erupted right now and buried you, your computer, and your cup of coffee, you would all be in situ until some archaeologist came and found you several centuries later. If the miniature watch were in situ, meaning it was used and deposited in the tomb 400 years ago, it could serve as evidence for sophisticated miniatured technology in Ming Dynasty China. (Or, as noted on Hot Cup of Joe, evidence that Hiro Nakamura was there.) More likely, however, the area is not so undisturbed as archaeologists there would like to think, and, while other objects in the tomb might be in their original mileau of cultural objects, this watch certainly isn't.

It is important to distinguish generalized context from in situ. Everything has context. To go back to our Elgin Marbles example, they certainly have a context in the British Museum: they have been there for almost two hundred years, they are surrounded by other works of art and antiquity, people travel just to see them. But they are not where they were originally intended to be, stuck on the side of the Parthenon.

Finding something in situ is the best way for archaeologists to determine the original function, appearance, and age of objects, rooms, and sites. Several storage jars found on a floor may indicate something about the use of the room or the jars themselves (like if, say, there were also a mill found in the room, grain storage would be likely). The dating of those jars helps indicate when the room was used and abandoned. Those same jars floating around in soil above the room, perhaps disturbed by later looters or agricultural activity, offer little by way of specific information that the in situ pots would. But they still have a context, belonging with everything else found in their soil level.

So why In Situ? Well, first off, it's a cool archaeology phrase. Secondly, highlighting the importance of contextual archaeology and placing archaeological news and ethics into this framework are two of my main goals in writing this blog. And third, just like the storage jars, I make most sense in context, and the field of archaeology is it. As a friend pointed out to me the other day, as I was describing how people can often be better understood in the context of their families and backgrounds: "Spoken like a true historian."