Danger of a Single Story

Chimamanda Adichie delivered this talk to the TED global conference back in July of 2009. I was made aware of it only today by Nneoma, a Nigerian blogger who found it a bit pompous. I may be a bit too romantic, but I found the message quite inspiring. It was particularly welcome to hear about all of the things which Nigerians are good at during days when the news seems to be all about their bad deeds.

Restoring the Arch of Ctesiphon?

The U.S. military plans to assist regional Iraqi autorities in the "restoration" of a ruined brick arch. According to the story written by Pvt. Jared Gehmann of the 82nd Airborne, the Arch of Ctesiphon was built nearly 16 centuries ago and was formerly a popular tourist attraction in this part of Iraq.

Art and Science

Nori Jung is shown above standing in front of a map which I made with one of my students here at Valdosta State University. Nori created her own artwork on her popular television program, Norivision, using our map as inspiration. The map combines a LIDAR raster image based upon measurements using a laser taken from an airplane with our field measurements. The points on the map are our field measurements and the contour lines were drawn using the raw elevations and differences between the LIDAR pixel values.

My call to Nori Jung on her show, "Norivision." The show airs Friday nights at 8:30 PM on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network.

Sali Grace Ellier update


Omar Yoguez Singo, an artist, has been arrested in Mexico City after confessing to the murder of Sali Grace Ellier. The two best sources for news on this incident seem to be Kristin Bricker at NarcoNews and La Jornada, which is published at UNAM in Mexico City. There is no coverage in commercial newspapers or on television in Mexico as there has been none in commercial media here in the United States.

No Looting In Iraq?

It all started with a story by Martin Bailey in The Art Newspaper, and it was really the headline as much as the actual story that drew fire. As reported by Mr. Bailey,

An international team of archaeologists which made an unpublicised visit to southern Iraq last month found no evidence of recent looting—contrary to long-expressed claims about sustained illegal digging at major sites.

Mr. Bailey did also mention that the archaeologists only visited eight major sites in southern Iraq: Ur, Ubaid, Eridu, Warka, Larsa, Tell el-Ouelli, Lagash and Tell el-Lahm. However, he also clearly expressed his view that the extent of looting has been exaggerated both by reporters and by archaeologists. A similar view has been even more directly expressed in a blog commentary by Dr. Dorothy King -

The false claim of looting - along with the claim that the US could have prevented the thefts from Baghdad Museum - has been a major part of the anti-War propaganda.

Whether pro- or anti-war, it is clear that propaganda and political advocacy do color our perception of the illegal digging and trade in antiquities which have occurred both before and after the United States deposed Saddam Hussein by military force. Issues about protection of cultural resources cannot be separated from political and military issues in Iraq and other countries of the Middle East. Archaeology and protection of cultural resources are deeply embedded within the ongoing political and religious conflicts.

Relying both upon her own inspection of aerial photographs and upon research by Dr. Elizabeth Stone, Dr. King supports the gist of the Bailey piece in concluding that most looting on the major sites occurred prior to the start of the current Iraq war. Opposing views on the issue are being expressed, however, by David Gill, Larry Rothfield, and a number of other scholars posting to the Iraq Crisis discussion list. A first hand account of looting in southern Iraq presented by the Director of Antiquities in Nasiriya Province, Dr. Abdulamir Hamdani, can be viewed online at Safe Corner.

What a blogstorm!

Save the Torahs?

Jewish manuscripts smuggled out of Iraq since the fall of Saddam are a current topic of active discussion among archaeologists, artifact collectors, and legal experts on the Iraq Crisis discussion list. One of the stories which sparked this discussion is about Rabbi Menachem Youlus, pictured here.

A recent article by Caroline Prince in the Christian Science Monitor describes Rabbi Youlus as the "Indiana Jones" of Rabbis. That he very well may be, for as we have only recently learned, the fictional Indy is no professional but rather a "plunderer." As reported in the Jewish Bugle, Rabbi Youlus is reported to have sold a Torah "liberated" by a United States soldier to a synogogue in Fulton, Maryland for $20,000. In order for the object to be smuggled out of Iraq, it first had to be "dissassembled" into 60 panels. Rabbi Younus also mentioned to the Jewish Bugle reporter some unusual methods of "restoration" -

"Normally we write with a turkey feather or a goose feather, but you can't use it with that type of parchment," said Youlus, explaining he had to use a piece of wood resembling a chopstick.

"It was plenty of work. But the finished product is very nice," he said.

Disrespecting Indiana Jones



A minor blogstorm has errupted over the appointment of Harrison Ford to the Board of Directors of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). In this video a well-known scholar and advocate against the illicit trade in antiquities, Oscar Muscarella, expresses his opinion that Indiana Jones is not an archaeologist but rather a "plunderer."

What do you think?

The blogstorm began as a reaction to the AIA press release. Early reactions can be found in Numismatics and Archaeology and in Safe Corner. Both posts have many comments, largely agreeing with Muscarella in condemning Indy as a plunderer.

Death of Roxana Brown

Dr. Roxana Brown, an expert on southeast Asian ceramics who lived in Bangkok, Thailand, died while in custody in a Seattle prison on Wednesday morning. Dr. Brown had been arrested for a single count of wire fraud, the first arrest to come out of the federal government's aggressive probe into the antiquities trade and donations to Los Angeles museums. According to a story in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Dr. Brown died of peritonitis from a perforated gastric ulcer. Her brother, Dr Fred Brown of Chicago, previously reported that she died of a heart attack which he believed was brought about by the stress of her arrest.

Dr. Brown was the director of the Southeast Asian Ceramics Museum at Bangkok University in Thailand, and she had been confined to a wheelchair after losing her leg in the 1980s. She was in Seattle visiting family as she prepared to speak before an academic conference.

Federal investigators asserted Wednesday that Dr. Brown allowed her electronic signature to be placed on appraisal forms that were part of a tax fraud scheme in California. The perpetrator of the tax fraud scheme, Jonathan Markell, operated the private gallery "Silk Roads." Markell allegedly inflated the value of ceramic artifacts donated to museums, allowing collectors to claim fraudulent tax deductions. Archaeologists and museum curators interviewed in Thailand by the Bangkok Post expressed considerable skepticism regarding the evidence so far presented against Dr. Brown.

Derek Fincham gives some of the back story of the federal antiquities probe in his post at Illicit Cultural Property. I also wrote a previous post in this blog about the museum raids back on January 27th.

Looting and Southern California Museums
Federal authorities raided at least five museums in southern California on Thursday on suspicion of receiving and exhibiting artifacts looted from archaeological sites. The photograph above shows the raid in progress at the Los Angeles County Museum. A private gallery, Silk Roads, was also targeted.

Hat tip to Derek Fincham, Lee Rosenbaum, and Matthew Taylor for their earlier and more detailed blog posts on this story.

Sicilian marble scandal at the University of Virginia

The University of Virginia Art Museum is currently exhibiting "Acrolith" sculptures which were purportedly looted from the Hellenic site of Aidone on the island of Sicily. The Italian government's efforts to retrieve these artifacts has recently been reported in the New York Times and in the university's student newspaper, The Cavalier. Although many of the details are still unknown, the story which Italian prosecutor Silvio Raffiotta tells of how these artifacts made their way from Sicily into private collections reads like a good detective novel:

(The acroliths) were illegally excavated by tomb robbers in Morgantina in the late 1970s. They are believed to represent the goddesses Demeter and Persephone, whose cult was deeply rooted in Morgantina, which fell to the Romans in 211 B.C. In all, two heads, three feet and three hands were found; the body, most likely made of wood, might not have survived the centuries underground.

In a 1988 deposition, Giuseppe Mascara, a former tomb robber and antiquities dealer, told Mr. Raffiotta that in the spring of 1979 a young man had offered to sell him the two marble heads, which he said had been excavated in Morgantina.

“They were in the trunk of a car,” Mr. Mascara said in the deposition, and of “exceptional make.” But he did not buy them “because I didn’t know the man offering them to me and because of the asking price, which was enormous.”

Vincenzo Cammarata, another antiquities dealer who has been investigated for handling looted objects, also testified that he had been shown the acroliths, in the summer of 1979.

Mr. Raffiotta’s investigations began some years later and tracked the acroliths to the London showroom of the antiquities dealer Robin Symes, who is being investigated in Italy for dealing in looted art. Before arriving in London, the objects moved through Switzerland, a typical route used to disguise provenance.

Mr Raffiotta's reconstructed "chain of title" for the artifacts ends in 1980, when Mr. Symes sold the acroliths for a reported $1 million to Maurice Tempelsman. Templelsman, a Belgian-American diamond merchant more commonly known as the long-time companion of Jacqueline Kennedy, is believed to be the current owner. The University of Virginia Art Museum is apparently acting as a broker between Mr. Tempelsman and the Italian government as he endeavors to return the artifacts after a five year period during which they are being authenticated and appraised.

I was made aware of this interesting albeit sad story of international thievery and academic intrigue by Derek Fincham who writes the blog Illicit Cultural Property. Fincham also posted the photograph of the acroliths which appears at the top of this post.

8 Random Facts About Me...

Ishtar tagged me for this back on July 28. I made my list of facts right away, but got sidetracked in the posting by my recent move down here to Valdosta from Athens, Georgia. In any case, here are -

THE RULES:

1. Post these rules before you give you the facts
2. List eight (8) random facts about yourself.
3. At the end of your post, choose (tag) eight people and list their names (linking to them).
4. Leave them a comment on their blog letting them know they've been tagged!

Now for my eight random facts, about which I will be adding more information and links in coming days.

1. I am an Eagle Scout and member of the Order of the Arrow. As far as the Eagle rank goes, I just stuck around long enough. I loved camping and getting all the merit badges for outdoor stuff. I recall being a bit embarassed about scouting in front of my longhair school friends, but my dad was the scoutmaster and I really could not get out. The Order of the Arrow was a bunch of hooey from what I recall, although we were sworn to secrecy about all of it.
2. At the end of my family's stay in Nigeria, I contracted the tropical parasite schistosomiasis. I was cured by a series of treatments with antimony at Walter Reed hospital. There had been relatively few children treated prior to that, and I was very fortunate to be living in Washington, D.C. where the Walter Reed staff was actively researching the parasite because it was endemic in South Vietnam. There are less debilitating treatments available now. One of the leading researchers on schistosomiasis, Dan Colley, now teaches at the University of Georgia.
3. I was an art major for my first two years at New College in Sarasota, Florida. My paternal grandmother and aunt, Tabea and Melita Hofmann, were both published illustrators. The John Kieran and Ethel Hinckley Hausman books on wildflowers illustrated by grandmother frequently show up on internet bookstore sites as also does my aunt's book, A Trip to the Pond.
4. In 1982, I worked in the last year of a long-term archaeological research project on Black Mesa in northeastern Arizona. If you have seen the Chevy Chase movie "Vacation," then you may recall Black Mesa as the black cliff in the background when his station wagon breaks down in the middle of a hot, dry wasteland. The money for the archaeology on Black Mesa came from the Peabody Coal Company, and at the time Peabody seemed to be trying to do the right thing in terms of both environmental protection and negotiating with the local Dine (Navajo) and Hopi owners of the land that contained the coal they have been mining. Curently, there are bad feelings between the Dine and Hopi, and between both tribes and Peabody Coal.
5. I have always secretly liked Elvis Presley records, particularly "I Can't Help Falling in Love" and "Hunka Hunka Burning Love" when my testosterone kicks in.
6. I lived in Nashville as a teenager during the same time frame that Robert Altman was filming his movie there. Although I hated the movie at the time, I have to admit that it captures much of the variety of the Nashville scene at the time.
7. My last name is very common in Saxony, the southern part of east Germany. My father and I traveled there together several years ago but were not able to find any direct relatives. We did visit the Volkerschlachtdenkmal, however, designed by the architect Clemens Thieme and found a charming bookstore in Leipzig, Antiquariat Thieme
8. I have been singing in amateur choral groups since I moved to Athens in 1994. I am looking forward to a church choir rehearsal tonight here in Valdosta, as a matter of fact.

I now tag the following eight bloggers with this same meme:

1. Imnakoya
2. Akin
3. Pamelastitch
4. Shinade
5. Sabine
6. Carol
7. Heidi
8. Decrepit Old Fool

I will be emailing all of you and adding links. This is a very busy time for me.

Bombing of Temple at Marib, Yemen

A car bomber drove into a convoy of tourists and detonated at the "Queen of Sheba" temple in Marib at around 1800 (1500 GMT) on Monday. Nine people are reported killed; six Spanish tourists, the bomber, and two other Yemenis.

The 3,000 year old temple at Marib was lost to the desert sands after some initial digging there in the 1950's by Wendell Phillips until it was rediscovered using ground-penetrating radar (GPR). A multidisciplinary team from the University of Calgary headed by geographer Brian Moorman collaborated with Yemeni archaeologists beginning in 1998 to uncover and restore the temple. The Yemenis have hoped to attract tourists to provide economic development in this remote, northeastern corner of Yemen.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Hailed as Africa's "it girl" by Elissa Schappell and Rob Spillmann in the much-maligned July issue of Vanity Fair, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has already written two acclaimed novels while yet to celebrate her 30th birthday. Her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, draws loosely on her own childhood growing up in the university town of Nsukka in eastern Nigeria. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, is built around the Nigerian civil war of the late 1960s.

Miss Adichie impresses one as a vivacious and yet extremely thoughtful and sensitive young woman in her many interviews. Interviewed by Wale Adebanwi for Nigeria Village Square in 2005, Chimamanda politely corrected Mr. Adebanwi regarding his mistaken assumptions drawn from Purple Hibiscus. In the same breath, however, she expresses a reluctance to explain her fiction and a respect for multiple interpretations by her readers.

Another 2005 interview, posted on Chimamanda's website by Daria Tunca, explores her relationship to her generation of Nigerians and to great Nigerian writers such as Chinua Achebe. A recent profile by Marie Arana in the Washington Post shows a humble and mature woman who is willing to let slip personal recollections which are not altogether flattering. Chmamanda relates that her sister's Igbo nickname for her was agadi nwanyi, meaning "old woman."

I must admit that I am quite tardy in my own discovery of Chimamanda's fiction. Half of a Yellow Sun was awarded this year's Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction back in June, as recognized so eloquently by African blogger Koluki.

Reconstruction of the Al Askari shrine

A Memorandum of Understanding was signed by UNESCO and the Government of Iraq on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 for the reconstruction of the Al-Askari shrine. With a total budget of $8.4 million, the first phase of the project includes preventive works, an assessment of needs, and preparation of a scope of work for the restoration. In addition to the shrine’s Golden Dome and Ali al-Hadi shrine, the two minarets destroyed in the recent explosions on June 13th will be reconstructed. Alhamdulillah!

The Assemblage has a new piece by Will Anderson, commenting on Matthew Bogdanos' NYT op-ed which I discussed in a previous post.

Fighting for Iraq's Culture

Colonel Matthew Bogdanos, author of Thieves of Baghdad, had an op-ed piece in yesterday's New York Times¹ repeating his call for Europe to do more to crack down on the trade in antiquities looted from Iraq since the beginning of the U.S. invasion. He also advances a new challenge to European archaeologists to have their nations recruit guards for the archaeological sites which they have excavated.

I do not expect much to come of Bogdanos' proposal, and I doubt that he expects or wants much from the Europeans himself. As Bogdanos notes, providing security for archaeological sites would be viewed by the Iraqis, Iraqi expatriates, and the rest of the world as a statement in support of the war. We should however acknowledge the assistance of both Poland and the Czech Republic in providing professional archaeologists and experts in cultural property.

Bogdano calls for a humanitarian effort to protect a cultural heritage rich with common ancestry that predates the splits among Kurd, Sunni Arab and Shiite. This is a noble proposal but one which I am certain he himself recognizes will fall on deaf ears given that it comes from a colonel in the U.S. Marine reserves. We can only hope that cultural treasures like the "Lion attacking a Nubian" shown above will be well cared for by whatever museum or private collector manages to obtain them through the illegal antiquities trade.

¹Bogdanos, Matthew, 2007, "Fighting for Iraq's Culture," New York Times, March 6.

Spaceship Earth

A sculpture titled "Spaceship Earth" by the Italian sculptor Eino has apparently fallen to pieces only three months after it was installed on the campus of Kennesaw State University on the outskirts of Altanta, Georgia. The sculpture was dedicated to the memory of the renowned California environmentalist David Brower and made of 175 tons of blue quartzite quarried from Brazil.

According to an article by Aixa Paschal in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Eino's original intention was for the sculpture to be installed in Brower's hometown, Berkeley, California. Berkeley refused the sculpture, however, claiming that it could find no land for it. Members of a local arts committee also apparently found the sculpture aesthetically substandard. I can see why it was considered an appropriate addition to the campus at Kennesaw State, which has an excellent program in life science with an environmental emphasis. Hopefully, the demise of the Spaceship Earth sculpture is not an omen of things to come for the real thing.

Stolen Iraqi treasure sold at auction in Munich

Two stolen ancient Sumerian artefacts exhibited in a Munich art auction house and on the internet were sold on Tuesday, according to a Deutsche Presse-Agentur release. Although the legality of the auction was challenged by Iraqi authorities, German customs officials said the Munich sale had already taken place and could not be stopped. One item sold was a 227-millimetre-tall, headless limestone statue of a Sumerian man that dates back to 2500 BC. The other was an 117mm-long nail made of clay which bears Sumerian inscriptions dating back to King Shulagi of the Ur dynasty in 2097 - 2095 BC.

There is a "red list" posted here of artifacts that may be finding their way onto the antiquities market from Iraq, either stolen out of the Iraqi National Museum or looted from unprotected archaeological sites. There is also a partial list of artifacts stolen from the Iraqi National Museum on the webpage of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.