One of the many famous utterances of Homer Simpson, is that “it’s funny ’cause it’s true”. The same could be said of this spoof article – aside from the idea of sending modern day looters there, which hasn’t been suggested yet by the government, but it doesn’t take too much stretching of the imagination to imagine it happening.

Afterall, how could any modern day obstreperous larrikin hoping to save a couple of hundred pounds on a TV hope to compete with some of the great British looters of old, who are now revered as great adventurers, discoverers and protectors of world history.

The only thing that wouldn’t occur if it happened is people in the government managing to see the irony in the plan.

From:
Daily Squib

Looters of Summer 2011 Rehabilitated With Visits to British Museum
By Sir Neil Sloane 4 hours 50 minutes ago

LONDON – England – The Summer of 2011 was notable for the riots across Britain, and the chaos that ensued such riotous looting behaviour. There is some positive news about the people involved in the rioting, as government agencies have rehabilitated over 95% of the looters, sources claim.

“The looters of 2011 are all rehabilitated and cured. It was actually quite a simple operation to cure the majority of the looters and vandals who perpetrated such heinous bouts of rioting during the late Summer 2011. We simply took them on weekly excursions to the British Museum in London to show them that looting is a terrible crime and must be stopped at all costs,” Angela Brinkinstowe, a health worker at the government’s Loot Less Initiative told the Daily Mail.
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More coverage of the looted Afghan artefacts, which were returned by the UK earlier this year.

From:
Museums Association Journal

Hundreds of stolen items returned to Kabul | Museums Association
Patrick Steele
01 September 2012

Some of the 825 stolen objects returned to the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul in July, with the assistance of the British Museum and Ministry of Defence, were saved by a London-based philanthropist.

The British Museum’s Middle East curator, John Simpson, said the philanthropist offered to acquire the objects for the Afghan museum if the British Museum could “advise on legality and process” and act as an intermediary.
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The recent return of artefacts to Afghanistan that were recovered within the UK highlights the fact that over 9,000 looted items have been returned to the country in the last ten years. These returned items have been carefully packaged & put in storage until a new museum is built that can properly display them in a secure environment – a fact that makes nonsense of the issue raised in the past (before the opening of the New Acropolis Museum) that the Parthenon Marbles could not be returned because Greece had nowhere to put them.

From:
Guardian

Treasures returned to Afghan museum
Around 9,000 stolen artefacts returned since 2001, says minister Sayed Masaddeq Khalili

Hundreds of looted treasures have been returned to Afghanistan with the help of the British Museum and UK police and border forces.

The haul is just a fraction of what has been stolen from Afghanistan’s national museum and rich archeological sites in recent decades. Once a wealthy part of the ancient silk road, it was criss-crossed for centuries by traders and conquering armies who left buried traces of their presence.
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More coverage of the artefacts returned to Afghanistan, after being seized in the UK.

From:
The Hindu

U.K. returns artefacts to Afghanistan
LONDON, July 20, 2012
Hasan Suroor

More than 800 historic artefacts — stolen from museums in Afghanistan some 20 years ago and smuggled abroad — have been returned to Kabul with help from the British Museum.

They include: a rare sculpture of Buddha, pieces of the Begram Ivories dating back to the 1st century B.C., Bronze Age carvings and medieval Islamic coins.
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More coverage of the ongoing attempts by the UK to return various Afghan artefacts, that have been seized by UK border officials. I’m unclear why the number of artefacts has altered significantly since the previous article I posted about it a few days ago.

From:
Independent

Looted treasures returned to Afghanistan by British Museum
Dalya Alberge
Thursday 19 July 2012

The British Museum, aided by British police and the UK Border Force, has helped return to Afghanistan hundreds of looted antiquities seized from smugglers, The Independent can reveal.

David Cameron will announce in Afghanistan today that 850 treasures have been repatriated, having been passed to the British Museum for safeguarding following their confiscation in Britain over the last two years.
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After briefly returning to Scotland in 2010, some of the Lewis Chessmen are going to return on a semi permanent basis to the island where they were discovered. It is unclear how much SNP leader Alex Salmond’s demands for their return have led to this decision & moreover, whether the British Museum is getting anything in return for the deal. I am very interested to find out more details of the exact loan agreement that has been made.

From:
BBC News

13 June 2012 Last updated at 15:20
Historic Lewis Chessmen returning to Western Isles

Six Lewis Chessmen are to be displayed long-term at a new museum on the Western Isles, where more than 90 of the historic pieces were found.

An agreement has been reached between Comhairle nan Eilean Siar (Western Isles Council) and the British Museum.
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Two stolen artefacts from a Greek church & one of the monasteries on mount Athos have now been returned to Greece & are going on temporary display.

From:
Greek Reporter

Ancient Greek Items Exhibited at Athens Byzantine Museum
By Marianna Tsatsou on June 3, 2012

Two stolen ancient items, which were displayed until recently in the UK, were transferred to Greece and are now hosted by the Athens Byzantine and Christian Museum beginning as of Wednesday, May 30.

The items will be kept in Athens only temporarily at the Museum, until being given to representatives of the appropriate Ephorates of the Hellenic Museum of Culture.
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Birmingham University has returned various skulls & bone fragments to the Salinan tribe in San Luis, Obispo County, California, where they have been re-buried.

Returns of artefacts involving human remains from institutions in the UK have now become commonplace (although there are still many more cases awaiting consideration). Pressure from the British Museum has made sure that these are differentiated from those that don’t involve human remains. So, whereas once, they said nothing could be returned, when faced with political pressure, they categorised their collection, to allow some of it to be returned, but make no difference to the case for retaining the rest of it. One could cynically argue, that this particularly appealed to them, as they had almost no items in their collection involving human remains (most of those were taken by the Natural History Museum in London when it was split off as a separate institution).

Only certain museums in the UK are covered by the Human Tissue Act, but once these institutions started making returns, the cultural climate shifted, paving the way for many more institutions to follow their lead.

So, the return of human remains is now relatively accepted (as is the one for items looted during the holocaust AKA Nazi Era) – but the campaign still needs to be won for the many other disputed artefacts that have the misfortune in not being in either of these special categories.

From:
Los Angeles Times

Native American skulls repatriated to California from England
How seven skulls from a California tribe got to the University of Birmingham is unclear. But their return appears to be the first event of its kind in the state.
By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times
May 20, 2012

Nobody thought much about the locked metal cabinet in the medical school at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. It was another forgotten fixture in the anatomy department — until a researcher last year found seven skulls with yellowing labels indicating the remains were those of Native Americans from California’s Central Coast.

Earlier this month, the skulls and several bone fragments were boxed and gingerly placed aboard a jet to LAX at London’s Heathrow Airport. In a quiet ceremony, they were reburied in San Luis Obispo County, more than a century after their odyssey began.
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Unfortunately, this article was posted so late, that the event had already passed by the time I read it – It sounds like it could have been interesting though, for anyone who did get to see it.

From:
Kansas City Star

Roger Bland: A License to Loot or Archaeological Rescue?

What:
The British Museum’s Roger Bland looks at the successes of the U.K.’s Treasure Act and Portable Antiquities Scheme, legislation aimed at curbing the looting of historic sites while guaranteeing that those who find treasure are compensated. Bland is head of the Department of Portable Antiquities and Treasures of the United Kingdom and is the American Institute of Archaeology’s Metcalf Lecturer for 2011-2012. Co-sponsored by the University of Missouri

Where:
Kansas City Public Library
Kansas City MO

When:
Monday, April 16 @ 6:30 pm

For reasons that are unclear to me, Britain has never ratified the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. This is despite declaring in 2004 that they would ratify the convention. The only reason I have ever been given was that it conflicted in some places with existing laws in Britain, that would need to be amended first.

From:
Independent

Letters: Back the world ban on looting
Friday 30 March 2012

The March 2003 invasion of Iraq by a coalition led by the US and the UK failed to prevent the immediate and appalling looting of museums, libraries, archives and art galleries, followed by years of looting of archaeological sites across the country.

On 14 May 2004, the UK Government announced its intention to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, and its protocols of 1954 and 1999. Today, on the ninth anniversary of the invasion, it has still to honour this commitment. This is despite all-party support for ratification and recently reiterated support for ratification from the Ministry of Defence, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. The USA ratified the Convention in 2009. This leaves the UK as arguably the most significant military power, and certainly the only power with extensive military involvements abroad, not to have ratified it.
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Kwame Opoku has forwarded me a response to Neil MacGregor’s assertions that the artefacts should not be returned & instead substituted with travelling exhibitions to help share the artefacts.

From Kwame Opoku via email.

Travelling Exhibition as Alternative to Restitution? Comments on Suggestion by Director of the British Museum.

The Director of the British Museum has indeed a fertile mind that never tires of inventing new defences for the retention of looted artefacts of others in the major museums.

Once it became clear that the infamous Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums. (2002) and its principles were not as effective as the signatories thought, other approaches had to be considered.

One such approach is the “travelling exhibition”. This seems interesting and reasonable until one begins to consider what is being proposed. MacGregor is reported in Elginism to have told an audience at the University of Western Australia that due to globalisation, the concept of “travelling exhibitions” will become more relevant;
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For some, metal detecting is an innocent hobby with an occasional chance of making a big find. For many archaeologists though, the practice requires much tighter regulation, to stop illicit digging of artefacts without any proper excavation or cataloguing of the finds taking place. New programmes in the US, American Digger & Diggers, both seem to be encouraging this fairly carefree attitude to digging up the past & a there are a fears that a new series in the UK could also serve to publicise it.

Paul Barford has already written quite a bit about this program on his blog.

From:
Guardian

TV treasure hunt show to pick Britain’s most important archaeological find
Britain’s Secret Treasures on ITV to follow experts as they judge the merits of antiquities discovered in the UK in the last 15 years
Maev Kennedy
Monday 26 March 2012 13.17 BST

Historians and archaeologists are arguing over the single most historically important archaeological find among almost a million objects discovered in the UK in the last 15 years. Contenders include the heap of glittering Anglo-Saxon gold of the Staffordshire Hoard, a scruffy little coin that proved the existence of a previously unknown Roman emperor, a bronze token that some claim entitled the bearer to the illustrated services in a Roman brothel, a stone hand axe, or the eerie shimmering beauty of the Crosby Garrett Roman helmet.

The debate will be followed over a week of primetime television programmes being made for ITV, Britain’s Secret Treasures, to be broadcast in July and presented by the historian Bettany Hughes and the veteran journalist Michael Buerk in his first appearance on the channel.
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