" ... In many cases the nations asserting rights to artifacts have little in common, culturally, religiously, artistically, or even ethnically, with the civilizations buried beneath them. Modern Peru, for example, was built in the vacuum left by the systematic destruction of the Inca civilization, whose legacy the country now claims. "It is a stretch of the imagination," says Cuno, "to link modern Egypt to ancient Egypt, modern Greece to ancient Greece, modern Rome to ancient Rome, communist China to ancient China." Nonetheless, countries like Italy, Greece, Turkey, China, and many others have laws that make any antiquity found on their soil automatically the property of the state.
The demands of this nationalistic system, its critics say, can sometimes overrule the best interests of the artifacts. In a 2006 essay in the New York Review of Books, the philosopher and Princeton professor Kwame Anthony Appiah argued that such laws have even destroyed antiquities. Soon after the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, Appiah pointed out, it was a UNESCO treaty prohibiting the removal of antiquities from their country of origin that prevented concerned scholars from rescuing pre-Islamic artifacts before the Taliban, branding them idolatrous objects, destroyed them.
"Would the ideologues of cultural nativism...find solace in the fact that these works were destroyed by Afghan hands, on Afghan soil?" Appiah wrote.
[ ... ]
For archeologists, the problem with looting is not simply that it is stealing, but that it destroys archeological sites, erasing irreplaceable information. A funerary jug scrubbed clean and presented for sale to a museum has far less to offer an archeologist than one found in the ground, where everything from its location and positioning to its contents and the composition of the soil around it - in short, its context - can offer clues to the sort of culture that made and preserved it.
To illustrate the point, Brian Rose, president of the Archaeological Institute of America and an archeology professor at the University of Pennsylvania (and a curator at the university museum), gives the example of a site called Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey. Under excavation since 1994, it is the oldest known temple complex in the world, predating Stonehenge by 7,000 years. If it had been looted, and its pillars and carvings brought onto the market with no context, Rose argues, "they probably would have been branded as forgeries" because their existence so fundamentally challenged archeologists' understanding of the earliest eras of human history.
The value of the current system to archeologists is that source countries like Italy and Greece, whatever their motivation, have proven better protectors of dig sites than museums have. "I think the nation-states are trying to do a good job of maintaining and protecting their antiquities," says Malcolm Bell, an archeology professor at the University of Virginia ... "
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