Egypt & Greece have both been beset by rioting in the past twelve months & have both had high profile thefts from their museums. Every effort must be made, to try & stop similar events happening again. Once items disappear once, there is no guarantee that the country will recover them – they are pieces of their history that has been preserved for many years, yet is now no longer there. They are losing part of their cultural identity.

From:
Guardian

Precious past: why the ancient assets of Greece and Egypt must be saved
20th Feb 2012

While Greece and Egypt are destabilised by the eurozone debt crisis and revolution, we must do more to protect their vast store of the world’s antiquities

In the British Museum on a Sunday afternoon, ancient faces look back at children and adults alike. Inside their glass cases, pharaohs and priests are unfazed by the crowds. And crowds there always are, for these are the painted coffins and carved masks of the ancient Egyptians, relics of a culture that has entranced the world for thousands of years.
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Following their requests for the return of the Samsat Stele, Turkey is blocking the planned loan of an artefact to the UK. The author of this article, feels that they should be focussing first on protecting the heritage that they already have in their country, before trying to retrieve items such as this. I still can’t understand though, why when we want an artefact to stay in the UK, this is completely acceptable, but when someone else asks for their (in many cases stolen) artefact to be returned, it is decried as “cultural nationalism.”

From:
New York Times

April 11, 2012, 9:33 am
Treasure Hunters
By ANDREW FINKEL

ISTANBUL — “Hajj: journey to the heart of Islam,” the British Museum’s recreation of Islam’s holy pilgrimage, has attracted much praise and a dash of controversy, as Huma Yusuf recently wrote on Latitude. Meanwhile, another interesting story related to the exhibit has percolated down to Turkey, the successor state to the empire that ruled over Mecca and Medina for centuries and once controlled the major pilgrimage routes.

Turkey was founded in the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, and its great museums – the Topkapi Palace and the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum – hold many of the important historical artifacts associated with the Hajj.
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More coverage of the decision by Greece to reduce the costs for filming permits at the country’s ancient sites.

From:
Kathimerini (English Edition)

Greece cuts filming costs at Acropolis
Thursday, January 19, 2012
By Natalie Weeks

The Acropolis, Greece’s star attraction for 2,500 years, may be preparing for a bigger role.

The Greek government lowered the permit costs this month for using archaeological sites and museums for film crews to 1,600 euros ($2,039) a day from as much as 4,000 euros in a 2005 pricelist, and for professional photographers to 200 euros from 300 euros, according to the Culture and Tourism Ministry. Historical spots include the Acropolis, which houses the Parthenon, and Delphi, home of the ancient oracle.
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In the UK, most of the major museums are prohibited from deaccessioning any of their artefacts – often by specific clauses in their governing charters. Smaller museums also have difficulty doing so, as they may struggle to get funding grants if they do. Most of the issues in the UK with regards to deaccessioning are in terms of it being used as a blocking mechanism to prevent serious debate on many restitution claims.

In the USA, the situation is very different – more museums are independent of government & are free to sell items in their collections – this however raises potential new controversies with the deaccessioning of valuable items being used as a source of quick money.

From:
New York Times

Small Town, Big Word, Major Issue
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: December 27, 2010

LITTLE FALLS, N.Y. — This small city up the hill from the Erie Canal is known for manufacturing paper and tea, for rooting on its Mounties at high school football games, for deposits of quartz that glint like diamonds and for the Victorian mansion that houses its 100-year-old library.

And now it’s also known locally as the place where the library director took a stand — or started a fuss, depending on your point of view — when the library board started selling historical items from its collection.
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International laws such as Unidrois convention that deal with cases of disputed cultural property (Through their adoption by UNESCO) are seen by many as a good thing – although clearly not by all, as many countries have yet to subscribe to these conventions. The conventions do not act retrospectively however – so there is a strong argument that they have created a division in the market – between those artefacts acquired before the convention came into force & those acquired afterwards. Many collectors fear that these conventions are devaluing their collections – but this point is counterbalanced byt the fact that is the artefact was acquired legitimately & has good provenance (which is the only real way of proving that it was acquired legitimately) then there should not be any problems.

From:
New York Times

Auctions
Wanted: Antiquities Beyond Reproach
By SOUREN MELIKIAN
Published: December 17, 2010

NEW YORK — The impact of the Unidroit convention, adopted by Unesco when endeavoring to protect the artistic heritage of mankind, starting with its archaeological treasures, is beginning to make itself as never before, although not quite in the way that its promoters expected.

By all accounts, the terrifying destruction of archaeological sites goes on, from Syria to Afghanistan to Nepal. But on the auction scene the consequence of Unidroit, to which only a few countries subscribe, is that some collectors live in fear that their favorite game, buying the relics of antiquity, may soon end. Many suspect that objects that cannot be proved to have been acquired before 1970 — the cutoff date set by the Unidroit convention — will become financially worthless or exceedingly difficult to negotiate.
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The Met has been hitting the headlines fairly regularly with news of positive decisions on restitution cases. The latest artefact return involving the New York museum is the Morgantina Silver, following an agreement reached in 2006 allowing them joint custody of it with the Aidone Archaeological Museum.

From:
New York Times

A Trove of Ancient Silver Said to Be Stolen Returns to Its Home in Sicily
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
Published: December 5, 2010

AIDONE, Italy — They came in throngs. On Friday afternoon hundreds of residents from this tiny hilltop town in eastern Sicily excitedly trekked up the steep slope to the town’s archaeology museum to celebrate the return to Aidone of a treasure trove that was buried nearby some 2,200 years ago and illegally whisked away in more recent times.

This year this cache of 16 Hellenistic silver-gilt objects known as the Morgantina silver was on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. For decades archaeologists, magistrates and eventually the Italian government had attempted to convince the museum that the pieces had been illegally excavated 30 years ago from Morgantina, an ancient Greek settlement whose ruins lie next to Aidone.
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The latest stage in an escalating dispute between Peru & Yale University, over Inca treasures taken from Machu Picchu, is an official request by Peru’s president for Barack Obama to intervene.

From:
New York Times blogs

November 3, 2010, 5:21 pm
Peru Seeks Obama’s Help in Dispute With Yale
By RANDY KENNEDY

Escalating a war of words between his government and Yale University, President Alan García of Peru has made a formal request for President Obama’s intervention in a long-running dispute over the ownership of a large group of artifacts excavated in 1912 at Machu Picchu by a Yale explorer.

Peru has argued that the items were only lent to the university and should have been returned long ago. Yale has contended that it returned all borrowed objects in the 1920s, retaining only those to which it had full title. In 2007 the sides reached a tentative agreement that would have set up a long-term collaboration and granted title of the disputed antiquities to Peru while allowing a certain number to remain at Yale for study and display. But that deal fell apart in 2008, and Peru filed a civil suit in federal court in Connecticut.
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One hundred and fifty years after the looting & destruction of Beijing’s Summer Palace under the instruction of the Eighth Earl of Elgin (son of the seventh earl who removed the sculptures from the Parthenon), China is still trying to retrieve some of their cultural treasures that were taken following the event.

From:
New York Times

China Remembers a Vast Crime
By SHEILA MELVIN
Published: October 21, 2010

BEIJING — In early October of 1860, the commanders of the British and French forces waging war on Qing Dynasty China held a tense conference outside the gates of the Garden of Perfect Brightness — Yuanmingyuan — on the western outskirts of Beijing.

Victory was at hand, the emperor having fled on an “autumnal hunting tour,” and the meeting concerned its spoils: Each side feared the other would obtain more booty from looting the huge complex.
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The long running trial of former Getty Curator Marion True has continued on & off for a number of years. It has now come to an end – not because any verdict has been reached, but because of the statute of limitations on the laws under which she was being tried brought an automatic end to the proceedings.

So, we are none the wiser about whether or not the trial would have been successful for Italy in securing a conviction (or securing the return of artefacts). Now that the legal action is over & people are able to speak more freely though, hopefully more details of the case will be revealed.

From:
New York Times

Rome Trial of Ex-Getty Curator Ends
By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO
Published: October 13, 2010

ROME — The case against Marion True, the former curator of antiquities at the J.Paul Getty Museum, ended abruptly on Wednesday, after a court here ruled that the statute of limitations on her alleged crimes — receiving artifacts stolen from Italy and conspiring to deal in them — had expired.

The trial had dragged on intermittently for five years. Numerous witnesses testified for the prosecution, which argued that Ms. True knowingly bought ancient artifacts of dubious provenance for the collection of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The trial was widely believed to be the first instance of a museum curator facing criminal charges for such alleged crimes.
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One of the key differences between museums in the UK & those in the US, is that while the ones in Britain tend to often be run almost as though they are a distant offshoot of the government, those in the USA tend to be run far more like a normal business.

In the UK, deaccessioning of any form is generally seen as something to be avoided – the charters that govern many of the countries major institutions explicitly prohibit it except in a very narrow range of special cases. This tends to lead (whatever the intention of the institution) to the dominance of quantity over quality, meaning that maintaining the overall quality of the collection is only possible by keeping vast amounts of it permanently in storage. In the USA on the other hand, the opposite approach is often taken. The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas is an excellent example of this approach, whereby acquisitions are only ever made with the aim of enhancing the quality of the collection & as a result are generally countered with a consequent deaccessioning to remove one of the less significant pieces from the museum. As a result, the museum’s collection is generally percieved as gaining in quality over time, rather than merely increasing in size or scope. The running costs of the museum are also significantly reduced by the fact that it does not need to create vast stores of artefacts that are never seen by the public except at special request.

More contentious though in the US (& even more so in the UK, particularly in the case of the Watts Gallery), is the idea that museums could sell off parts of their collection to cover their own operating costs.

The problem is that whilst there are benefits to both arguments, many institutions in the UK use anti-deaccessioning clauses in their governing charters as something to shelter behind when restitution requests are made, rather than actually dealing with the issue itself.

From:
New York Times blogs

September 14, 2010, 4:38 pm
Board of Regents Ending Injunction Against Museums’ Art Sales
By ROBIN POGREBIN

In a surprise development in the battle over whether museums should be allowed to sell art to cover operating costs, the New York State Board of Regents on Tuesday approved the expiration of emergency regulations regarding such “deaccessioning” on Oct. 8.

Those rules, which enjoined such sales, have been in effect since 2008. After hearing views from museums statewide, “there was no consensus on the efficacy of those emergency regulations,” David Steiner, the state’s education commissioner, said in a statement. Thus, “those regulations will be allowed to expire, allowing the prior regulations regarding museum collections to once again take effect.”
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The British Museum has in the past been eager to argue that the Lewis Chessmen are from Norway & therefore neatly bypass any connection that they might have with Scotland (the place where they were discovered – no records exist of them prior to being found on a Hebridean beach in 1831. New research suggests that the British Museum’s statement may be incorrect though & that the chessmen possibly originated in Iceland..

From:
New York Times Blogs

September 7, 2010, 12:30 pm
A New Theory on the Origin of the Lewis Chessmen
By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN

The Lewis Chessmen are the most famous and important chess pieces in history. They have a long historical and scholarly record, part of which is that they were made in Norway roughly 800 years ago. But now two Icelandic men are challenging that belief and trying to prove that the pieces came from their country.

The pieces were discovered on the Isle of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, in 1831 — hence their name. Carved mostly out of walrus tusk, they were found in a small carrying-case made of stone inside a sand dune. There are different theories about how they ended up there, including that they were left over from a shipwreck or that they were stolen and buried on the island and then forgotten.
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For many years, certain elements of the British Press liked to suggest that Greece was incapable of looking after the Parthenon Marbles if they ever were returned. During the construction of the New Acropolis Museum, questions were again raised about every possible aspect of the way the museum was being built & the way the artefacts would be displayed. The New Acropolis Museum does however have many parallels with the proposed Stone henge Visitor Centre.

Both Stone Henge & The Athenian Acropolis are iconic examples of their historical epochs. For a long time, both sites had planned on building new visitor centres, but the projects were plagued by delays lasting decades that stopped any meaningful progress. Now however, Greece has a brand new Acropolis Museum, while visitors to Stone Henge still have to make do with distinctly lacklustre visitor facilities that mainly consist of a tunnel around the road containing a gift shop & some information boards. The British Museum makes much of how the Parthenon Marbles can be seen in their institution for free, but on the other hand, Stone Henge (with or without visitor centre) charges an admission centre except to National Trust or English Heritage members.

From:
New York Times

The Age of Austerity Challenges Stonehenge
By JULIA WERDIGIER
Published: August 11, 2010

STONEHENGE, England — The prehistoric monument of Stonehenge stands tall in the British countryside as one of the last remnants of the Neolithic Age. Recently it has also become the latest symbol of another era: the new fiscal austerity.

Renovations — including a plan to replace the site’s run-down visitors center with one almost five times bigger and to close a busy road that runs along the 5,000-year-old monument — had to be mothballed in June. The British government had suddenly withdrawn £10 million, or $16 million, in financing for the project as part of a budget squeeze.
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