Walking down the pristine hallways of the Museum of Fine Arts, most visitors focus on the aesthetics of legendary works of art, thinking little about the logistics and processes that bring pieces from faraway countries to Boston. But some of those artifacts may have had a much seedier beginning, looted under the cover of darkness from sites across the ocean, according to Boston University professor archaeologist Ricardo Elia.
Italian authorities said last October they had evidence proving the MFA had received looted works of art, according to a July 28 The Boston Globe article. In July, the MFA announced it would return an unspecified number of artifacts to the Italian government. MFA officials declined to comment for this article.
Elia said the vague wording of the MFA’s acquisitions and provenance policy allows the museum to acquire undocumented antiquities that are possibly looted, as long as the museum’s directors think the piece is significant enough.
“It’s a huge problem across the board,” he said. “This [has been] a major problem with antiquities collections by museums . . . for 50 years.”
Elia said antiquities-rich countries, including Egypt, Italy and Greece, have strict laws prohibiting the removal of antiquities from the country without government permission.
However, he said, “tons and tons” of material continues to come from these countries each year. Looters plunder archaeological sites, smuggle valuable objects out of a country and then sell these artifacts on the art market in other countries, including the United States, Britain and Switzerland.
Museums then purchase or receive these “looted” objects, considered to be undocumented because they do not come with a long history of ownership or origination. Elia said about 85 to 90 percent of materials found in Sotheby’s auctions or in museum catalogs is undocumented. He said the MFA’s current acquisitions policy allows its directors to receive these undocumented artifacts without investigating the possibility that the works were looted.
“In other words, they’ve just given themselves a rationale for continuing to buy undocumented antiquities if they think it’s important,” he said. “It gives them a huge loophole that you could drive a truck through. In our view, the majority of this material is looted and recently looted.”
BU law professor Alan Feld said he prefers to avoid labeling undocumented material as looted because it can then be too easily confused with simple theft. In current settings, he said, diggers go by night on private land to unearth antiquities.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘looting’ for that,” he said.
Artifacts dug up in this way present an ethical and legal dilemma for U.S museums. The Italian government claims to own all objects under the ground, so the United States must treat these artifacts as property of the Italian government. Artifact diggers also disturb archeological digs, destroying historical evidence about the site and the artifacts, Feld said.
“But with this stuff, it’s highly questionable about how much additional knowledge of Roman times we’re going to get if somebody digs up a pot and sells it to a collector in the United States,” he said.
Archaeologists worry about the problem of looting because it destroys historic sites, Elia said. On the other hand, archaeologists carefully excavate sites, documenting positions of objects and learning from that site to gain greater knowledge and information about ancient cultures.
“The past is threatened by all sorts of things,” he said, “but looting is one of the most problematic of the threats because looting is the deliberate, systematic, targeted destruction of archaeological sites for the sake of acquiring art objects.”
Elia said he is worried about stopping the current and future looting of archaeological sites and that more stringent policies will stop the museums from acquiring possibly-looted material.
“It’s very simple,” he said. “If the museums are serious about not promoting looting and being the beneficiaries of looting–which they are–they need to have . . . strict policies that say they will not acquire undocumented antiquities. Period.”
Elia said museums should pick a date – preferably a year such as 1970, the year of the UNESCO agreement, a convention that laid out guidelines for prohibiting and preventing the illicit transport and transfer of cultural property. Then, a museum must provide published proof that the piece in question had circulated in private collections or on the market before the chosen date. This material may be originally undocumented, but the policy still staves off present-day looting because to acquire the piece, a museum must prove the work had circulated in the art world for the past 30 to 40 years.
“What this does is turn around the burden of proof,” he said. “It makes [museums] have to have positive knowledge. That’s an acceptable compromise, I think, because you’re trying to guard against looting taking place now and looting taking place in the future.”
Feld said he would not want to prevent a museum from acquiring an undocumented object, given that the underlying mission of a museum is to educate and exhibit artifacts for the public at large.
“I’m not suggesting that the museums should actively conspire with people to go and dig,” he said. “You want to prevent the outlet . . . I don’t think the United States can effectively do that on an individual museum basis. I think museums have to recognize a balance between acquiring objects for exhibition and study . . . and on the other hand discourage the destructive way in which some of these artifacts have been produced.”
If museums strengthen their policies to discourage present-day looting, Elia said, the activity would cease almost immediately because it is dependent on an economic system of supply and demand. The MFA’s current policy is simply too lax, he said.
“They’re going to cut the best deal they can with the Italians . . . and then just keep going on in the future, buying things as they usually do,” he said. “And in the long run, that’s not going to solve the problem of looting.”
Feld said at this point, museums face more of a threat from bad publicity than from countries of origin.
“I think the biggest sanction museums face in this area is not that some sovereign power is going to demand the artifact,” he said. “The worst thing is publicity. Museums implicitly at least claim the handle of being good guys, and they don’t want to be seen with the bad guys.”
The United States already uses its customs laws and criminal laws to cut down on illicit dealings, Feld said.
“I think you have to give museums discretion,” he said. “Otherwise, they’re going to be shut out of the market.”
Elia suggested that museums could end looting and still gain access to artifacts by dealing with an object’s country of origin directly, using loans and cooperative agreements.
“They have a lot of expertise in the museum world that they can share,” he said. “This would be a way of doing it without promoting the illicit market.”
Archaeologists and museums are currently at odds because museums still accept undocumented materials, Elia said.
“They’re on opposite ends of a battle, and the battle is either to preserve the past or exploit it,” he said. “This is why we’re so vigorously opposed to these policies–because they’re not protecting the sites.”