Hot from the Tomb: The Antiquities Racket

THE notoriety of the New York Metropolitan Museum's Euphronios vase (TIME, March 5) has had at least one beneficial effect: directing attention to the scandalous world market in archaeological thievery. The looting of ancient sites is an ancient custom. A great deal of the treasure in the world's museums was originally pirated by foreign powers or smuggled out. Today the countries of the world officially operate on more elevated principles--but art thievery thrives as never before. It is a multimillion-dollar business that gets amphetamine shots from events like the Met's $ 1,000,000 calyx krater purchase. Tragically, it is also leading to the wholesale destruction of archaeological treasures, and occasionally murder along with theft.

Authorities estimate that $7,000,000 worth of antiquities evaporate from sites in Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, Israel and Italy every year. Treasure worth millions of dollars more is plundered from Latin America and the countries of Southeast Asia. Some $3,000,000 in booty originates in Italy alone, the richest source of plunder in the Mediterranean basin.

The racket in Italy involves a couple of thousand fulltime, professional tombaroli or tomb robbers, most of them peasants who know their land intimately. They work in teams. There are, for instance, at least twelve organized groups plundering the Etruscan sites in Cerveteri. Their scorn for official archaeologists is extreme.

Since most Etruscan tombs are underground, they are found by pushing a steel probe into the earth or sometimes by stamping and listening for reverberations. Then a hole is opened with a pick and shovel and the prizes dragged out. Just two weeks ago, in the area of Cerveteri from which the Met's vase is alleged to have come, the police found one group at work; the robbers fled, leaving their haul of 51 valuable Etruscan objects behind.

The flow of Italian artifacts converges on about 50 mediator! (middlemen), who make their arrangements primarily with dealers in Switzerland or Italy. Important pots and bronzes are smuggled across the Swiss border in car trunks or, if small enough, in air luggage. Once in Switzerland, the hot object can be "washed" (given a provenance, or certificate of origin) and exported legally to any country in the world. For every dollar a tombarolo makes, the mediatoro will stand to get $5--and the final dealer $20 or more.

Collectors often show a frank indifference to the origins of their pots and bronzes. Said an official of the antiquities museum in Basel, Switzerland: "It's public knowledge that 90% of the certificates of origin accompanying such works of art are totally unreliable. Most certificates are manipulated. The Italians can raise a ruckus, as in the case of the Metropolitan vase. But if they cannot prove anything, their claims are worthless. Unless the Italian authorities can come up with something like a photograph showing a work of art in an identifiable Etruscan tomb, they don't have a leg to stand on."

Meanwhile, the cycle of thievery and corruption repeats itself all over the world. Harvard's Professor G. Ernest Wright, president of the American School of Oriental Research, recalls how in the Middle East he met "the son of an Iranian government official with a suitcase full of ancient works of art," which he was selling to defray his university expenses. Turkey has some 3,000 archaeological sites, of which only a fraction have been excavated by trained and government-sanctioned archaeological teams. The rest are simply raped. Even the official digs are ill-protected by a skeleton force of guards, who are paid an average $50 per month--not a salary likely to attract qualified men capable of thwarting organized robbers like the trio who, in 1968, broke into the Izmir Fair Archaeological Museum, rifled its collection of antique Aegean jewelry, vases and marble carvings, and crushed the watchman's skull with a stolen statue as they departed.

What infuriates responsible archaeologists about the bootleg trade is not merely its illegality, or its size, but the fact that it involves a wholesale destruction of knowledge about the past. The traditional excuse of collectors--museums as well as private individuals--has been that the way a vase or a bronze is acquired cannot outweigh the benefits of having it on display to the public.

New York Met Director Thomas Hoving proclaimed that with the acquisition of the Euphronios vase, "the histories of art will have to be rewritten." Dr. Giovanni Scichilone, 39, archaeological director of the Italian government's antiquities bureau for southern Etruria, rejects this aesthetic evaluation as too narrow. "Maybe a new generation of men will come," says Scichilone, "who are finally ready to appreciate the fact that the Euphronios vase by itself is nothing more than a war trophy, a lion skin. You can't get any historical meaning from archaeology until you deal with tomb groups, not single items. The tomb group of Euphronios might have helped write for the first time a few lines of entirely new history about Etruria, about Etruscan trade and economy of life."

What tombaroli disperse and often destroy is precisely that kind of vital information. In this way the unfettered acquisitiveness of museums in America and elsewhere, with their concentration on "masterpieces," results in a form of destruction of the past. Connoisseurship and history have become enemies.

Archaeological theft is so open that museums that buy stolen objects do not always bother to conceal it. Their regular policy, says William D. Rogers, a Washington, D.C., attorney concerned with the legal and ethical aspects of acquisition, is "the less you know, the better." The Met itself has a suspect collection of 219 objects ranging from pottery to rare silver ewers and vases. When the collection was bought through a New York dealer, J.J. Klegman, in 1966, it was widely rumored that the Met had at last acquired the so-called Lydian treasure trove. The Lydian collection came out of four 6th century tombs found near the ancient site of Sardis in Turkey. There is no doubt, according to Turkey's Foreign Minister Haluk Bayulken, that the entire Lydian collection was looted. Though the Met was invited by TIME to comment on the acquisition, it declined to do so.

By and large, the poorer and more primitive the country, the worse the thievery. Says Clemency Coggins, an authority on pre-Columbian art and archaeology: "Not since the 16th century has Latin America been so ruthlessly plundered." Teams descend (sometimes literally, from helicopters) on any of the hundreds of Mayan ceremonial sites that lie scattered throughout Mexico and Guatemala.

The face carvings are ripped away with carbide-toothed power saws; cruder thieves use hammers, wedges or fire to split the irreplaceable sculptures into fragments for easy transport. In March 1971, Archaeologist Ian Graham, a research fellow in Middle American archaeology at Harvard's Peabody Museum, entered La Naya, a Mayan site in Guatemala; looters opened fire, killing his guide Pedro Sierra. In Costa Rica, says Dr. Dwight Heath of Brown University, who spent a Fulbright year there in 1968-69, "One percent of the labor force was involved in illicit traffic in antiquities--which means there are more bootleggers in that little country than there are professional archaeologists in the whole world."

It was not until 1970 that UNESCO adopted a convention aimed at the thieves' trade. Like other museum men, Hugues de Varine, director of the International Council of Museums in Paris, thinks this document is "better than nothing." But neither he nor anyone else is really optimistic about it as only three of its 26 articles call for real action from the signatory nations; these refer to the need for export certificates, tightening of penalties for theft and prohibiting museums from buying stolen antiquities. So far, only a few countries, like Ecuador and Honduras, have signed the convention. The U.S. signature has been ratified by the Senate but not the House of Representatives.

A more useful potential deterrent to illicit trade is a U.S. law passed by Congress last fall prohibiting the import of pre-Columbian monumental sculpture and murals without the approval of the country of origin. This is a start, but not an end; it does not apply to smaller pieces like pottery and goldwork, and thieves in Latin America will destroy a whole site to find one Mayan gold ornament. One thing is clear: as long as astronomical prices are offered by rich countries, no local laws will keep robbers from plundering.

The ultimate responsibility lies with the consumers--private collectors and museums alike. John D. Cooney, the curator of ancient art at the Cleveland Museum, ruffled his colleagues' feathers by publicly declaring earlier this month that "95% of ancient art material in this country has been smuggled." He was only voicing what is common knowledge to every curator, collector and dealer in the world.

The standard defense for smuggling is the Elgin Marbles ploy: if Lord Elgin had not "rescued" the Parthenon sculptures from the Turks in Athens, they would probably no longer exist. The British Museum was built on the Empire's plunder. Napoleon had no qualms about ransacking Egypt for the Louvre. Likewise, since the Latin Americans or Italians "cannot look after" their own archaeological wealth, it is the collectors who preserve it by extracting it from their hands.

Robbers. Offered in 1973, such reasoning drives archaeologists to near frenzy. Said Nicholas Hellmuth, who headed a 1970 dig in the ancient Mayan city of Yaxja in Guatemala and saw tombs laid waste by robbers: "I'd like to take the next museum art director I see and dip him in honey and tie him up near an anthill." The big collections, say Curators Bennet Bronson and Donald Collier of Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, are supporting an entire underworld. Collectors usually deal only with the last--and most gentlemanly--middlemen. In an atmosphere of genteel negotiation, it is all too easy for acquisitive collectors to concentrate on the beauty of the object and forget about how it was obtained. This is natural, since the death of the stolen antiquities trade might mean the end of grand-scale collecting.

One possible solution to the dilemma would be an international fund to enable each country to protect its treasures, and then a systematic, international sharing--on a long-loan basis --or swapping, so each country could broaden its collections. Italy, for example, could swap a vase for a French impressionist painting. Failing that, museums must become more scrupulous. A group of museums in the U.S. has already taken the first significant step. In recent years policy statements have been issued by the Field Museum, the University Museum in Carbondale, Ill., the University Museum in Pennsylvania and all the collections of Harvard University. They all agreed not to buy any ancient artifact whose pedigree was in doubt--and their embargo extends to accepting gifts of such pilfered material from collectors.

Although cultivated murmurs of approval have been heard from other U.S. museums, so far only a handful have followed suit. So the bootleg market rises, the plundering goes on and the split between scholars and collectors widens. All of which brings to mind the words of Alfred Jarry's monarch of absurdity, Pa Ubu: "Hornstrumpot! We shall not have succeeded--unless we demolish the ruins as well."

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