This
is the first of two posts. [Update September 16: Post #2 can be found here.]
On September 7 the Society of Biblical Literature
(SBL) posted a newly-adopted Policy
on Scholarly Presentation and Publication of Ancient Artifacts, set to go
into effect in 2017. This represents the first time the society has adopted
such a policy. The focus of the policy is providing standards for dealing with
the issue of provenance of artifacts. However, it appears that many scholars,
both archaeologists and text scholars, may not be completely familiar with how provenance
policies work, or with the term or concept of provenance. This post will look
at what provenance is and why it is important; a follow-up post will look at
the details of SBL’s provenance policy.
Provenance is a term adapted from art history: it refers
to the chain of custody of a work of a painting or other work of art, tracing
it back ideally to its creation by an original artist. For archaeologists, the
only truly acceptable origin point of a chain of custody is in the ground – or
some equivalent (for instance, an inscription found in situ in the wall of a standing building).
Why does provenance matter for ancient artifacts? I
can identify at least four fundamental reasons: authenticity; archaeological
context; law; and ethics.
1. Authenticity.
Provenance is the basis of determining the authenticity of an object; this is
the original application of the concept in art history, going back to the
origins of the term in the 19th century. In archaeology, an object that can be
traced back to the ground (or which is otherwise in situ at a site) can be virtually guaranteed to be an ancient
artifact. Objects that have other points have origin – which can only be traced
to an antiquities dealer, or to a collector – must be inherently under suspicion.
Tools such as chemical tests of material, or various philological or
iconographic analyses, can also be important in determining authenticity. But
good forgers are able to make use of these tools as much as any scholar;
provenance is much more difficult to fake.1 From another perspective: these tools can only (more or less) prove a forgery,
while provenance alone can (more or less) prove authenticity.
2. Archaeological
context. When an object’s provenance is a controlled archaeological
excavation, we are provided with a great deal of information about that object:
its specific site of origin; its phase or stratum, which provides a date; and
its location within a site, including the specific room or building it was
found in and other associated artifacts. Knowing the archaeological context of an
artifact is the first step in studying typology, chronology, and distribution –
fundamental tasks of both archaeology and epigraphy.2
We can also learn much about how an individual object was used. Even when an
object is found in a secondary context (such as a fill layer), we can learn
much about how that object was discarded, or reused. Lack of provenance means
that we have lost all of this information
From a stratigraphic perspective, however, the basic
unit of analysis is not the individual object but the archaeological unit, the
locus. Put another way, what matters is not simply the information context
provides about a single artifact, but the information that a group of artifacts
and architecture provide about a context: a room, a courtyard, a building. If we
assume that a significant number of unprovenanced artifacts are not stray
surface finds but are looted – an assumption widely shared by archaeologists 3
– then lack of provenance indicates an even greater loss. Looting affects not
simply a single artifact but an entire assemblage as well as the context they
were in.4
Objects that are not seen as valuable, such as potsherds and animal bones – in
others words, the vast majority of finds in most archaeological contexts – are
simply discarded. In addition, the material above that context, the entire
stratigraphic record of that area of the site, is destroyed.
Let’s consider a specific example: the Archive Complex
in the Late Bronze Age palace at Pylos, Greece.5
I have chosen this example specifically because it involves texts,as it is
often argued that texts have a great deal of information in themselves and that
not much is lost without contextual information.6
This example may not be a typical one, but is far from unique, and indicates
clearly some of the types of information recoverable about texts in
archaeological contexts. About 1200 tablets were recovered from the excavation
of the palace at Pylos, of which about 1000 were found in the two-room Archive
Complex. From the findspots of the tablets in the archive rooms (along with
occasional finds in other parts of the palace) in combination with other
associated finds and architecture, and clues from the tablets themselves, we
can draw the following likely conclusions about the tablets: they were mostly
composed in different areas of the palace where the materials they record were
stored or worked; they were transported to the Archive Complex in wicker
baskets with labels indicating their contents; they were processed in the
larger of the two archive rooms; they were worked and fixed, or pulped to
recycle the clay (the tablets were unbaked) with water from a pithos (a large
storage jar) in the corner of the larger room; they were transferred to wooden
baskets and stored on wooden shelves in the smaller room; and they were discarded
yearly, after being transferred to more permanent material, perhaps papyrus,
kept elsewhere in the palace. We can also estimate the number of individual
scribes, determine the frequency of their writing, and identify a probable
master scribe who oversaw the processing of the tablets in the archive rooms. In
other words, finding tablets in their archaeological contexts in the Archive Complex
(and the rest of the palace) at Pylos allows us to reconstruct many elements of
scribal activity that would be otherwise unknown.
If any of these tablets had appeared on the market as
unprovenanced, it would mean that looting had not only ripped the contextual
information from an individual text, but had also destroyed all or part of the
Archive Rooms along with their contents.
3. Law. Excavation and trade in antiquities are highly regulated
activities, and there is a
series of national laws and international treaties that severely restrict
legal conduct. In the Middle East, most countries have prohibited both export
of antiquities and trade in antiquities for decades, and all artifacts are
legally property of the state. The only exception (to my knowledge) is Israel,
and even there antiquities trade and ownership are highly regulated. The
Antiquities Law of 1978 declares that all antiquities discovered from that date
are owned by the state; trade (by licensed dealers) is only allowed in objects
discovered before that time. The primary international instrument regulating
trade in antiquities is the 1970
UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit
Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. In occupied territories (for
instance, the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and Northern Cyprus) and in
cases of warfare, the 1954
Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed
Conflict is also in force, prohibiting transfer of antiquities out of
occupied territory and severely restricting activities such as excavations. As
a result of this legal regime, not only is forgery a crime, but most genuine unprovenanced artifacts have also
likely been illegally excavated and/or smuggled from their country of origin.
Archaeologists, epigraphers, and other scholars of
the ancient world deal with unprovenanced texts and artifacts all the time. To
take some recent examples that have been in the news: the Museum of the Bible’s
collection (such as the Dead
Sea Scroll fragments just published by Brill); the Al-Yahudu
tablets of Judean deportees in Mesopotamia; and the so-called “Afghan
Genizah,” a set of medieval Jewish documents
from Afghanistan. It is likely that the majority of these artifacts are
either fake or illegally excavated and smuggled out of their country of origin.
The Al-Yahudu material apparently comes from Iraq, but its exact origins are
unclear: the owner of the largest collection has claimed (without providing
documentation) they can be traced back to the antiquities market in the 1970s, though
there are claims that they first surfaced on the market in the 1990s, after
massive looting of Iraqi sites in wake of the Gulf War.7
The Afghan material appeared a few years ago, rumored to be from one or more caves
in the country, but with no clear information on provenance. (The Green
collection has not been forthcoming about the origins of their material, so it
is difficult to comment; I have not yet had a chance to look at the newly
published volume to check for information on provenance). The Iraqi Antiquities
Law no. 59 (1936) with amendments in 1974 and 1975 declared ancient artifacts to
be property of the state, outlawed export of and trade in antiquities, and
regulated excavations. In Afghanistan, the Law on the Protection of Historical
and Cultural Properties (2004) and prior antiquities law prohibited export of
antiquities except by the state, while strictly regulating excavation, allowing
private ownership of registered artifacts, and regulating trade in antiquities.
4. Ethics.
Even if legal issues were not a concern, we would still have to deal with our
professional ethics. Antiquities are looted because there is a market for them,
that is, because people collect them. When scholars work on them in the long
process from authentication to publication, they are increasing the value of
objects and ultimately helping to increase demand.9
As scholars, do we want to play a role in increasing looting – and creating a
vicious circle that leads to further loss of information for the material we
study? Do we want to be a party to smuggling artifacts from their countries of
origin to ultimate destinations abroad – especially when they are often
smuggled out of developing nations to more powerful ones? In this case we
should keep in mind the
entangled histories of archaeology, exploration of the Middle East, and
imperialism.
Provenance is an essential starting point for dealing
with any ancient artifact. It is the foundation for determining proper
approaches to essentially all aspects of work with both individual pieces and
entire assemblages. “Where is this from?” should be the first question we ask
about an object, and the answer should control our course of action in multiple
ways. Researchers who ignore any of these aspects of provenance do so at their
enormous peril.
1 On the need to take the skills and tools of forgers
seriously, see Christopher A. Rollston,
Non-Provenanced Epigraphs I: Pillaged Antiquities, Northwest Semitic Forgeries,
and Protocols for Laboratory Tests, Maarav
10 (2003): 135-193.
2 Christopher Rollston provides an excellent treatment with
examples from epigraphy in Non-Provenanced
Epigraphs II: The Status of Non-Provenanced Epigraphs within the Broader Corpus
of Northwest Semitic, Maarav 11.1
(2004): 57-79.
3 See the discussion in Neil Brodie, Consensual
Relations? Academic Involvement in the Illegal Trade in Ancient Manuscripts,
in Criminology and Archaeology: Studies
in Looted Antiquities, ed. Penny Green and Simon Mackenzie (Oxford: Hart,
2009), p. 47.
4 As pointed out, for instance, by Patty Gerstenblith,
Do Restrictions on Publication of Undocumented Texts Promote Legitimacy?,
in Archaeologies of Text: Archaeology,
Technology, and Ethics, ed. Matthew T. Rutz and Morag M. Kersel (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2014), p. 216.
5 On the Archive Rooms, see John Chadwick, The Mycenaean World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976), chapter 2, The Documentary Evidence; Thomas
G. Palaima and James C. Wright, Ins
and Outs of the Archive Rooms at Pylos: Form and Function in a Mycenaean Palace,
American Journal of Archaeology 89
(1985): 251-262; Kevin Pluta, A
Reconstruction of the Archives Complex at Pylos: A Preliminary Report, Minos 31-32 (1996-1997 [1998]): 231-250.
6 For instance, John Boardman, “Archaeologists,
Collectors, and Museums,” in Whose
Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities, ed. James
Cuno (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 113: “To claim that an
object without context is worthless is pure nonsense. Renfrew showed us a
famous Greek vase in New York, the interest of which is 98 percent in its sheer
existence (we know who made it, when, and where) with only a 2 percent loss in
knowledge of what Etruscan grave it came from.”
7 See Daniel Estrin, Ancient
Tablets Displayed in Jerusalem Part of Debate over Looting of Antiquities in
Mideast, Associated Press, February 12, 2015. See also the comments by
Caroline Waerzeggers, Review
of Laurie E. Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch, Documents of Judean Exiles and West
Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer, Strata: Bulletin of the Anglo-Israeli Archaeological Society 33
(2015): 188.
8 See Janet Ulph, Criminal
Offences Affecting the Trade in Art and Antiquities, in The Illicit Trade in Art and Antiquities:
International Recovery and Criminal and Civil Liability (Oxford: Hart,
2012), p. 110.
9 This is a
debated point, but Neil Brodie persuasively argues that the entire process of
scholarly involvement with collectors and unprovenanced artifacts is much more
extensive than simply a final publication, and that this process has a
significant effect on the market for antiquities: see for example Brodie, Scholarship
and Insurgency? The Study and Trade of Iraqi Antiquities, presentation at
Institute of Advanced Studies Workshop, “Illicit Traffic of Cultural Objects:
Law, Ethics and Realities,” August 4-5 2011, University of Western Australia;
Brodie, Consensual Relations.
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