Showing results 13 - 24 of 31 for the month of March, 2009.

March 13, 2009

Modelling the Acropolis in three dimensions

Posted at 5:40 pm in Acropolis, Greece Archaeology

Hi-tech geo-spatial systems are being used to create a three dimensional representation of the Athenian Acropolis. Highly detailed digital models such as this can be used both in the restoration & cataloguing of the monument, but also as a resource to allow visitors to explore areas that they would not otherwise be able to access & to allow it to be seen from positions that would be otherwise impossible to reach. As museums enter the twenty-first century, integrating archaeology & technology in this ways is becoming increasingly important. Constructing modern buildings in three dimensions is relatively easy – but to accurately reconstruct ancient sites with complex terrain & parts of the building missing etc requires far more sophisticated technology.

From:
Spatial News

LPS Instrumental in 3D Modeling of the Acropolis

Norcross, GA – ERDAS announces that LPS was recently selected and utilized for a significant project to create 3D models of the Acropolis in Greece. LPS is an integrated suite of photogrammetry software tools for generating terrain models, producing orthophotos and extracting 3D features.

This project, called the “Development of GIS at the Acropolis of Athens” was financed by the European Union and the Government of Greece, and supervised by the Acropolis Restoration Service, Hellenic Ministry of Culture. The partners in this project are ELLINIKI PHOTOGRAMMETRIKI Ltd (ELPHO), Athens and GEOTECH O.E., Athens. GEOINFORMATION S.A., the authorized ERDAS distributor in Greece provided photogrammetric support to ELPHO for this project.
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Should the culture be taken out of cultural property?

Posted at 5:29 pm in Similar cases

Kwame Opoku responds to this piece on Antiquities Watch.

From:
Afrikanet

Datum: 11.03.09 16:03
Kategorie: Kultur-Kunst
Von: Dr. Kwame Opoku
Mine is mine but yours is ours Comments on a suggestion to take culture out of cultural property

I enjoyed reading the article entitled “Yours, Mine, Ours: Taking the Culture out of Cultural Property” in Antiquities Watch (1) and I have sympathy for some of the views expressed there. It is an interesting article and offers food for thought. However, when I started to reflect on a few of the ideas expressed therein, many difficulties appeared.

The author refers to the increased interest in cultural property matters and the fact that “cultural property is drawing on an increasing range of cultures, nations, and sentiments involving both.” He poses the question whether this is “hurting the causes of restitution and cultural property protection? Are we, by politicizing art and antiquities, jeopardizing their protection, if not original meaning?”
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Bronze drum stand in the British Museum may be looted

Posted at 5:19 pm in British Museum, Similar cases

Evidence suggests that an artefact currently on loan to the British Museum for a temporary exhibition may have been illegally excavated. It could be argued that although the museum does not own the artefact, it is going against its own loan guidelines in accepting it for the exhibition.

From:
The Art Newspaper

Bronze at British Museum may be loot
Drum stand now owned by Shanghai Museum but origins unclear
By Martin Bailey
Posted online: 11.3.09 | From Issue 200 (March 2009)

LONDON. The centrepiece of the Chinese bronzes exhibition, “Treasures from Shanghai”, at London’s British Museum appears to have been illegally excavated within the past few years. However, it is now legitimately the property of the Shanghai Museum. The British Museum show is the first time the bronze has been exhibited.

Dating from 770-476 BC, the drum stand is decorated with three intertwined dragons. It probably comes from the tomb of a ruler, from a site that is unknown to archaeologists, possibly in Shanxi Province. Other important finds, such as musical instruments, may well have been looted from the tomb.
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March 12, 2009

Greek president urges workers to end Acropolis strike

Posted at 12:53 pm in Acropolis

Greece’s president Karolos Papoulias has now called for an end to the strikes that are currently closing Athens’s Acropolis to visitors. Whilst there is sympathy for the strikers, their actions have the potential to cause major damage to the Greece’s tourist trade.

From:
Associated Press

Greece: Strikers close Acropolis for back pay
1 day ago

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Striking Culture Ministry employees closed the Acropolis to visitors Wednesday for the fifth time in two weeks, turning hundreds of tourists away from the ancient site.

The protesters are mostly contract workers demanding permanent jobs and back pay. Hundreds of visitors stood outside the entrance as strikers handed out fliers detailing their demands.
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March 10, 2009

YSL artefacts raise questions about art auctions

Posted at 12:31 pm in Similar cases

In an increasingly globalised economy, auction houses are finding themselves caught in the middle of disputes over cultural property.
This is not something that they can easily ignore though, as te disputes often involve countries as well as individuals – countries that these same auction houses also want to operate within.

From:
The Independent

Auctioneers ‘hit in China bronzes row’
By James Pomfret and Ben Blanchard, Reuters
Tuesday, 10 March 2009

The heated row over Christie’s sale of looted Chinese bronze animal heads in Paris is being closely watched by key art market players for possible signs of a broader fallout.

Since Christie’s ignored protests from Beijing and last month auctioned off a pair of bronze rat and rabbit heads which were stolen from the Old Summer Palace in 1860, Chinese authorities have slapped strict checks on all future imports and exports by Christie’s, making it potentially more difficult to source top relics.
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March 9, 2009

China’s Melina Mercouri

Posted at 7:10 pm in Similar cases

This piece on the Chinese Bronzes identifies Cai Mingchao as China’s Melina Mercouri – someone who will spearhead the fight to reunify cultural property with its homeland. Events such as the ones involving the bronzes often re-expose fault lines in international relations that people had thought were long forgotten, by highlighting the inequities of the past.

From:
Financial Times

Beijing bronzes expose faultline with west
By Geoff Dyer in Beijing
Published: March 6 2009 19:15 | Last updated: March 6 2009 19:15

Mention the Earls of Elgin and one notorious holder of the title springs to mind – the one-time British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (and 7th earl) who, in 1801, removed the marble sculptures from the Parthenon that are now housed in the British Museum.

His son is less well-known, but he was also responsible for what many view as an infamous act of cultural vandalism. In the aftermath of the second opium war in 1860, it was the 8th Earl of Elgin who ordered French, British and Punjabi soldiers to destroy the Old Summer Palace in Beijing.
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March 8, 2009

The Chinese bronzes & Gandhi’s glasses

Posted at 12:16 pm in Similar cases

Two recent auctions of disputed cultural property have drawn media attention to items that few people knew about previously. In both cases though, an added dimension has been created by attempts by the selling party to agree some sort of conditions under which they might be able to solve the dispute. This could be seen as an implicit acknowledgement that the restitution claims carry a level of validity, but in each case it has been used as a means to try & push a political agenda.

Standing back from the cases & temporarily setting aside the way in which the artefacts were acquired, it comes across as artefacts being taken, but then they can be returned to the original owners if they meet certain conditions. One has to ask, whether it is right for these selling parties to try & grab some small chunk of moral high ground (that they are prepared to negotiate – return the artefacts) where in reality they are holding the pieces to ransom as a means of trying to resolve other entirely unrelated issues. Whether or not the issues need to be resolved should not be the question & the setting of arduous preconditions to negotiations is merely a means of avoiding discussions that the sellers were never really interested in in the first place. The British Museum has in the past tried to attach similar preconditions to entering negotiations on the Elgin Marbles – as a barrier to prevent any sort of negotiations taking place.

From:
MSNBC

Chinese bronzes, Gandhi’s glasses in art tussle
updated 8:47 p.m. ET March 8, 2009
Art auctions becoming battlegrounds over rights to world’s culture

LONDON – A bronze rabbit’s head was the first to go under the hammer, then came Mohandas Gandhi’s glasses and sandals.

Auctions are becoming a new battleground for art dealers, activists and aggrieved countries dueling for plundered antiquities and lost pieces of heritage.
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March 7, 2009

The perils of art auctions

Posted at 12:08 pm in Similar cases

Many disputed artefacts only appear above the radar during the rare moments when they change hands. As a result, it is hardly surprising, that the relatively light regulation of auction houses is also brought to the fore when various parties are making claims that they are dealing in potentially stolen property.

From:
The Times

March 7, 2009
Richard Morrison on art auctions
Chinese sabotage at Christie’s is a warning to every owner of antiquities

One man’s terrorist, it’s often said, is another man’s freedom-fighter. Happily, there was no violence at Christie’s “auction of the century” in Paris last week. But the fury of the reactions to an act of sabotage by an incensed Chinese bidder has rocked the arts world.

The sale was of the late Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection. It went for a cool £330 million. But £28 million of that won’t be paid. It was the winning bid for two 18th-century bronzes, once part of a set of 12 animal figureheads on a water-clock in the Summer Palace outside Beijing. The fountain must have been rather cute in its prime. Each animal in turn spouted water for two hours a day. Then at noon all 12 would effusively spray in aquatic unison.
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March 6, 2009

The techniques used to secure return of looted artefacts

Posted at 11:51 am in Similar cases

Different countries have in recent years used a wide range of techniques to try & secure the return of disputed artefacts. Some of these approaches have had more success than others.

From:
South China Morning Post

Countries go to greater lengths to get looted treasures back
5 Mar 2009
South China Morning Post

China is not the only nation that wants missing relics back and many countries employ different means to retrieve them, write Tim Johnson and Julie Sell

Cambodia, are barely able to halt the plunder of sites like the ancient Angkor temples complex.
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Should Britain return the Koh-i-noor diamond?

Posted at 11:41 am in Similar cases

The Koh-i-noor diamond left India for Britain in 1850 as loot following a Sikh uprising. Since then there have been many calls for it to be returned.

From:
Times Blogs

March 03, 2009
Should Britain give the Koh-i-noor back to India?

It was reported yesterday that a descendant of Mahatma Gandhi has asked Britain to return the Koh-i-noor diamond to India, thereby adding it to a list of treasures which the UK is under pressure to restore to their original homes – most notably the Elgin Marbles. This also comes in a week when France has been asked to send back two bronzes from the collection of Yves Saint Laurent to Beijing, where they were originally looted from the Summer Palace.

The Koh-i-noor is an interesting case because it seems that almost from the moment it arrived in the UK there were doubts about its ownership. It was brought here in 1850 after the defeat of an uprising by the Sikhs in the Punjab, and was initially greeted as fair booty of war in this jingoistic leading article:
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Acropolis strikes continue

Posted at 11:16 am in Acropolis

Strikes continue on the Acropolis – an issue that needs to be resolved for the New Acropolis Museum, so that it can start as a reliably functioning entity.

From:
Balkan Travellers

27 February 2009
New Acropolis Museum strikes

Tourists hoping to visit one of Greece’s, and indeed the world’s, most famous cultural sites – the Acropolis, are disappointed for a second day in a row, as access to the site has been shut down by striking Ministry of Culture staff.

Demanding permanent positions and the payment of wages that are past due, the workers began their protest on Thursday, when they blocked the entrance to the monument and handed out flyers in different languages explaining the closure, international media reported. The strike is expected to last for three days.
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March 4, 2009

The problems of disputed artefacts

Posted at 11:08 am in Similar cases

The auctions of Chinese bronzes & of Mahatma Gandhi’s spectacles have both stirred up controversy, leading many commentators to highlight how many other similar unresolved cases there are.

From:
My Sinchew

They Are Auctioning Their Ancestors’ Shame
2009-03-04 12:35

When Chinese people are protesting against the auction of the two rabbit and rat bronze sculpture heads, the news of Mahatma Gandhi’s iconic spectacles, which he once said gave him “the vision to free India”, are to be sold at an auction in New York on 5 March, has caused public revulsion in India.

India, China, Egypt and Babylon are the world’s four great ancient civilizations. Sadly, in the human warfare history which is full of killings, a large number of relics from these ancient civilizations have become the victors’ bloody war trophies and are now losing abroad.
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