“Responsible Stewards” of Classical Antiquities?

Abstract

This article considers the relevance of the Society for American Archaeology's 2018 “Statement on Collaboration with Responsible and Responsive Stewards of the Past” for imported antiquities (specifically, “classical” ones—that is, from Mediterranean regions). Various practical, legal, and ethical differences between collecting imported versus domestic objects make it difficult to identify “responsive and responsible stewards” of the former. An obstacle to responsible stewardship of privately owned classical collections—and to collaboration between classical archaeologists and collectors—is the 2008 acquisition guidelines issued by the two leading professional organizations in the museum field. I argue that the best home for unprovenienced and poorly provenienced antiquities collections is in university museums, where their complicated object biographies can be fully researched, taught, and displayed.

Este artículo considera la relevancia de la “Declaración sobre colaboración con administradores responsables y receptivos del pasado” de la Sociedad para Arqueología Americana de 2018 para las antigüedades importadas (concretamente, las “clásicas”, es decir, las procedentes de regiones mediterráneas). Varias diferencias prácticas, legales y éticas entre la recolección de objetos importados frente a los nacionales dificultan la identificación de “administradores receptivos y responsables” del primero. El obstáculo principal para la administración responsable de las colecciones clásicas – y para la colaboración entre arqueólogos y coleccionistas clásicos – son las directrices de adquisición de 2008, publicadas por las dos principales organizaciones profesionales del ámbito museístico. Yo sostengo que el mejor sitio para las colecciones de antigüedades sin procedentes y con procedentes mal registrados son los museos universitarios, dónde sus complicadas biografías de objetos se pueden investigar, enseñar y exponer en su totalidad.

As an art historian trained in ancient Roman art, I was pleasantly surprised by the Society for American Archaeology's (SAA) 2018 Statement on Collaboration with Responsible and Responsive Stewards of the Past (Society for American Archaeology [SAA] 2018). Scholars of the material culture of the ancient Mediterranean and contiguous regions (the time and space often referred to as “classical antiquity”) tend to belong to the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) rather than to the SAA. But our field faces the same threats that motivated the SAA's Statement—specifically, the loss of irreplaceable historical information when artifacts are removed from their archaeological context without proper documentation (e.g., Gill and Chippindale 1993). As in the United States, such removals in Mediterranean regions are often (although not always) motivated by the desire for financial gain, because classical antiquities can sell for impressive sums on the international art market. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of classical collectors in the United States. There is no doubt that their demand spurs the looting and destruction of archaeological sites (Mackenzie et. al. 2020). “Collectors are the real looters” has been the rallying cry in the classical archaeology community since the 1993 publication of a private collection of Cycladica, but the AIA has taken a strong public stance against acquisitions of possibly looted antiquities ever since the very public brouhaha over the Metropolitan Museum of Art's purchase of the Euphronios Krater in 1972 (Elia 1993; Renfrew 1993; Shirey 1973).

It is also the case that many classical collectors are inspired by the same love of history and respect for ancient cultures that motivates professional archaeologists, as is also true of many collectors of Indigenous American artifacts (Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2004; Hart and Chilton 2015; Pitblado 2014a). Indeed, many classical collectors are members and financial supporters of the AIA. Unlike the SAA, however, the AIA, as a professional body, is a long way from recognizing any value in collaborating with private collectors. The two camps in the classical field—collectors and archaeologists—are still divided by same the suspicion, animosity, “isolation[,] and stagnation” that persuaded Bonnie Pitblado and Michael Shott to work toward greater collaboration among Americanists (Pitblado and Shott 2015:38).

What, if anything, can US-based scholars of classical—and, in fact, all nondomestic (but for the purposes of this article I will focus on the region of my own expertise)—material culture learn from the collegial and ongoing discussion among members of the SAA regarding collaboration with private collectors? The issues are similar but not identical. I will first discuss some of the practical and ethical differences between collecting imported versus domestic material in the United States. I will then consider some of the principles of the SAA's policy that I believe are helpful for thinking through the current situation in the classical field. I will conclude with some concrete suggestions for policy changes.

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN COLLECTING DOMESTIC VERSUS FOREIGN ARTIFACTS

Legality

The SAA Statement advocates collaboration not with all collectors but rather only with those who can be deemed “responsive and responsible stewards.” A key criterion is that they only “collect artifacts legally (for example, from private land with permission of the landowner)” or “own legacy collections that have been inherited from family members.” The equivalent for collectors of imported artifacts would be that they only acquire objects whose exportation from their country of origin and importation into the United States were legal according to both foreign and domestic laws.

It should be underscored from the outset that with most artifacts in private hands, whether foreign or domestic, legality is not inherent to—nor can it be determined from—the object itself. It must be proven by other means, such as other documents, and these can always be forged or misconstrued to support claims they do not actually prove. Written permission from a private landowner to dig for artifacts on their land, for example, is not proof that any given artifact was found there (Goebel 2015). The legal status of the American artifacts in private collections is rarely knowable. The situation with imported antiquities is more complicated because legality is a function of myriad foreign laws, not just American ones (see below). But it can also be said that unequivocal legality is a standard that virtually no participant in the classical antiquities market adheres to.

Two federal court cases, one in 1979 and another in 2003, have affirmed that US courts will treat foreign artifacts in the United States as stolen property if it can be proven that they were exported from their source country in violation of that country's national ownership laws (Gerstenblith 2009, 2016). Consequently, a potential archaeologist-collaborator looking to verify whether a classical antiquities collector always “collected artifacts legally” would want to see documentation either that the pieces left their country of origin prior to the date of the passage of any relevant laws in that country or that they were exported in accordance with those laws (e.g., with a government-issued export license; national ownership laws can be searched on UNESCO's List of National Cultural Heritage Laws). Knowledge of the country of origin and the date of exportation is also necessary to ensure that an artifact was not imported in violation of any specific agreement between the United States and that country, as per the 1983 Convention on the Cultural Property Implementation Act, the mechanism by which the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export, and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property was implemented (Gerstenblith 2013; agreements governing import restrictions can be accessed on the website of the Cultural Property Advisory Committee of the US Department of State's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs).

Alas, the vast majority of items that surface on the US antiquities market lack any information about their country of origin or their exportation. Take, for example, the “Roman Marble Portrait Head of a Man” for sale in May 2022, at the Manhattan gallery of Hixenbaugh Ancient Art (Hixenbaugh Ancient Art 2022). The web page offers quite a bit of information about where the head was before it reached this gallery: it was sold or consigned to Hixenbaugh by “J. D.”; it was previously sold twice at Sotheby's, in 2013 and 1985; and it was in a New York gallery called Anavian by 1977. But none of that detail is relevant to the legality of the portrait's exportation from its country of origin, about which we are told nothing. The absence of such information can have innocent causes (how many of us would be able to document when and where our family heirlooms were acquired?) or nefarious ones. Antiquities traffickers make sure that by the time their wares reach the US market, all information about their country of origin and the circumstances of their exportation has been thoroughly scrubbed, precisely to prevent restitution claims or criminal prosecution. There is no way to know which scenario—the innocent or the criminal—accounts for the lack of information.

Today, the territory of the former Roman Empire comprises more than 40 modern nations, each with its own cultural patrimony laws, passed at different dates, and of varying strictness. There is no way to tell from the Hixenbaugh head alone where it originated. There is therefore no way to rule out that, for example, it was not removed from public property somewhere in Greece at some point after 1834, when the Greek government declared that “all antiquities within Greece, as works of the ancestors of the Greek people, shall be regarded as national property of all the Greeks in general” (Voudouri 2008:126). The legality of this portrait head's importation into the United States—like the great majority of all classical antiquities that have been sold in the United States in recent decades—is therefore unknowable (although one can be certain that if Hixenbaugh were in possession of clear proof that his portrait head was legally exported, he would have mentioned it on the web page, given that such documentation would add greatly to the piece's value). For that reason, if it is a requirement that “responsible and responsive stewards” of classical antiquities limit themselves to demonstrably “legal” acquisitions, we will almost certainly end up with an n of 0 (Kersel 2020). As with the stipulation that American archaeologists collaborate only with collectors of legally obtained American artifacts, this guideline is better understood as an aspirational, ethical principle rather than as an enforceable rule.

Donatability

A second consequence of the unknown exportation history of most foreign antiquities in private US collections—and a significant difference between them and the domestic artifacts addressed by the SAA's recommendations on collaboration—is their undonatability to public museums. In 2008, the two leading professional museum organizations in the United States, the American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors, revised their acquisitions guidelines to align them with the 1970 UNESCO Convention. The American Alliance of Museums now enjoins members from acquiring

any object that, to the knowledge of the museum, has been illegally exported from its country of modern discovery or the country where it was last legally owned. In addition, the Alliance recommends that museums require documentation that the object was out of its probable country of modern discovery by November 17, 1970, the date on which the UNESCO Convention . . . was signed. For objects exported from their country of modern discovery after November 17, 1970, the Alliance recommends that museums require documentation that the object has been or will be legally exported from its country of modern discovery, and legally imported into the United States [American Alliance of Museums 2008].

Likewise, the Association of Art Museum Directors’ guidelines now stipulate that museums “should not normally acquire archaeological materials and ancient art without provenance demonstrating that the object was out of its country of modern discovery prior to or legally exported there from after November 17, 1970” (Association of Art Museum Directors 2008 [and 2013 revisions]).

It was only with the 2008 museum acquisition guidelines that the 1970 UNESCO Convention began to have real consequences for the classical antiquities market in the United States. Reassured by the limits on legal enforceability noted above, few dealers had curbed their commercial activities after the 1970 UNESCO Convention, or even after the Convention's 1983 US ratification. They simply took greater care to hide whatever they knew about the archaeological origins and exportation of their wares. The change can be seen over time in the New York–based Royal-Athena Galleries’ long-running annual catalog, Art of the Ancient World. The gallery regularly took objects back from its customers and relisted and resold them on consignment. The last year in which the catalog divulged specific information about where the artworks originated was 1985. So for example, in that catalog, a “Roman bronze seated Tyche or Fortuna” (#297) is listed as coming from “Bodrum, Turkey.” When the same object is listed in the 1997 catalog (#59), the only information given concerns where it has been since 1985. There is no mention of Bodrum or Turkey at all. This pattern is consistent across all objects that feature in the 1985 catalog and then subsequently reappear.

Prior to 2008, it was common for private collectors to assume that reputable dealers and prestigious auction houses were compliant with all relevant laws and international agreements (Marlowe 2022). Consequently, many of them have been dismayed to discover in recent years that the museums to which they had intended to bequeath their collections will no longer accept them (Blumenthal and Mashberg 2012). This was intentional: the archaeologists and cultural property advocates who had been urging museums for decades to align their acquisition policies with the UNESCO Convention hoped to disincentivize collectors by denying them the social capital as well as the hefty tax breaks that museum donations normally generate. Reduced demand should result in reduced looting—an obviously laudable goal. But the guidelines also have implications for the long-term care and preservation of private collections. Many collectors who had been planning to leave their collections to museums are now, reluctantly, returning them to the market (or planning to do so; Stapleton 2017:123).

This, in turn, has implications for archaeologists considering collaboration with private collectors, given that there is now no guarantee that their professional imprimatur will not be used to enhance the commercial value of the artifacts. It also means that the fourth recommendation of the SAA's 2018 Statement on Collaboration (SAA 2018), which urges collaborators to “encourage responsible and responsive stewards to donate their documented collections to an appropriate museum or public curation facility,” will be difficult—if not impossible—to implement.

Commerce

US collectors of non-US antiquities, almost by definition, acquire their holdings by purchasing them on the market. Given this fact, can they ever meet the criteria of being “responsible and responsive stewards”? The SAA's 1996 statement on the Principles of Archaeological Ethics takes a dim view of “commercialization,” equating it to the use of objects “as commodities to be exploited for personal enjoyment or profit” (SAA 1996). In their 2015 article laying out the “pros and cons of consulting collectors,” Shott and Pitblado (2015:11–12) stated unequivocally, “We believe that collaboration is warranted only with private collectors who do not loot, or buy or sell artifacts for the sake of possession or profit.” I do not see how the actions of American collectors of foreign antiquities can be construed as anything other than buying artifacts for the sake of possession.

In contrast, the 2018 SAA Statement on Collaboration with Responsible and Responsive Stewards of the Past is more reticent. It never addresses the matter of purchased artifacts directly. It mentions finding artifacts on private land and inheriting a collection from family members as two means of legally building or acquiring a collection. But it acknowledges that there are “other” ways to be a “legal artifact collector and collection owner,” although these are never defined or described.

By 2020, Pitblado and another colleague, Suzie Thomas, had adopted a more nuanced position than the one Shott and Pitblado expressed in 2015 (Pitblado and Thomas 2020). They are willing to grant the status of “responsible and responsive stewards” to the Holy Land pilgrims discussed by Morag Kersel (2020), who buy archaeological “souvenirs” from “Biblical times” in state-licensed shops in Jerusalem. I do not see how this differs from the actions of any other collector who buys artifacts legally “for the sake of possession,” but I am relieved that such behavior does not automatically disbar them from collaborations with archaeologists.

Lack of Proximity

In addition to their almost invariably murky legality, undonatability, and commercial circulation, imported antiquities also differ from domestic artifacts in that their US collectors are always at least one step removed from the objects’ archaeological origins. Unlike the amateur archaeologists who scour riverbanks and cliff faces on privately owned US land in search of Paleoindian points and other items for their personal collections, who can often be persuaded to bring professionals back to the site of their finds for scientific investigation, and who deserve credit for any number of paradigm-shifting discoveries over the past century and more (Pitblado 2014a), collectors of imported antiquities have no firsthand knowledge of the archaeological findspot (known as the “provenience”) of their holdings. Although they may have useful recollections about where they acquired their items (e.g., in an antique shop while on holiday in a small town in Tunisia) or what else was on offer at the dealer's shop at the time (e.g., was the piece they acquired once part of a larger group?) and other details concerning their objects’ “provenance” (ownership history), any information they report about the actual discovery of the objects in the ground will be thirdhand at best, via the finder and the dealer (but likely with many more intermediaries). It is unlikely that those parties allowed potentially incriminating factual details about the provenience to slip through the cracks; we therefore should handle dealers’ claims with extreme caution (Chippindale and Gill 2000; Marlowe 2016). Their potential to deepen our understanding of the objects’ ancient history, use, or meaning is severely limited.

SIMILARITIES

Principles and Pragmatism

Despite these important differences between collecting imported versus domestic artifacts, those of us who aim to protect the archaeological record abroad might nevertheless benefit from the SAA's insights about collecting, starting with the acknowledgment that the problem of looting is not going to go away. Collecting is a deeply human impulse. Neither decades of opprobrium nor increasingly restrictive policies have succeeded in curbing the demand for antiquities (Brodie 2014). As with drug use or teen sex, policy makers and stakeholders can press for hardline, abstinence-only approaches—or they can accept the inevitability of these practices and advocate for laws and social policies that mitigate harm (Moshenska 2010). A comparable controversy recently arose within the archaeological community over the role some archaeologists played during the war in Iraq (Hamilakis 2009; Rose 2007; and the collection of essays published in the Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 19 in 2009). Are our colleagues wartime collaborators if they teach the troops the significance of surface finds and advise the military where not to land their planes so as to avoid damaging ancient sites? Do such actions lend legitimacy to the United States' conduct of war? If so, should they be avoided by those who are antiwar? Or do we accept the things we cannot change and focus on minimizing the damage they cause? These tensions also shaped the various collegial responses to Shott and Pitblado's proposal for collector–archaeologist collaboration in the 2015 SAA Archaeological Record. As they summarized in their concluding commentary, we can decide whether or not to collaborate with collectors based on “a sense of what our nation should be (one without an imperialistic past, with stronger heritage laws, where only trained archaeologists indulge the urge to collect, and where collectors are not already having a profound impact on archaeological landscapes)” (Pitblado and Shott 2015:36). Or we can make that decision based on “the realities of the U.S. legal system, archaeological ethics, and human behavior” (Pitblado and Shott 2015:36).

I am persuaded by the case they make for a pragmatic approach. I am also persuaded by their argument that a pragmatic approach need not entail an abdication of principles or professional responsibilities. Friendly conversations with collectors can shift their views of the market; most archaeologists are educators, after all. Imagine a collector who bought Hixenbaugh's Roman portrait head. One might ask him whether there were additional heads of closely similar size, style, and stone in the shop. That might indicate that this was part of a family statuary group dedication, perhaps set up in a public space or a tomb. Too bad we do not have the bodies or the inscribed bases that this head or these heads were almost certainly once attached to. That would have told us who this depicted! This might lead to a discussion about why statue bases are left behind (no market value), or why heads and bodies rarely come together (worth more when separated). Seeing the links between looting, loss, and the market through the lens of the objects they already love and care for is much more likely to make an impact on an antiquities collector than a lecture about foreign heritage laws, shaming, or the silent treatment (Pitblado 2014b:343; shaming was explicitly recommended as the best response to collectors by one of the speakers on a panel about the fiftieth anniversary of the UNESCO Convention at the annual meeting of the AIA in 2020).

Multiplicities of Meaning

Another salutary principle that emerged from the debates within the SAA—and that some scholars in a range of disciplines have been arguing for a generation—is that professional archaeologists do not have a monopoly on the right way to engage with heritage (e.g., Brown 2004; Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2004; Greenland 2021; Hamilakis and Duke 2007; Hart and Chilton 2015; Hollowell-Zimmer 2003; Meskell 2009; Skeates 2000). Rather, “the best and most rewarding research involves as many stakeholders as possible” (Pitblado 2014b:342). This includes people who engage with objects in ways that we professionals might disapprove of.

As noted at the start of this article, there is no doubt that collecting fuels looting, and looting—“the illicit, unrecorded and unpublished excavation of ancient sites to provide antiquities for commercial profit” (Renfrew 2000:15)—erases the connection between the artifact and its archaeological findspot. This loss deprives us of crucial data about how, where, when, and by whom the object was last used, displayed, or deposited, which could in turn have illuminated aspects of its ancient culture: trade relations, gender norms, religious practices, social and political structures, beliefs about the afterlife, et cetera (Fincham 2009). For many scholars of the ancient world, there can be no greater loss; their unequivocal condemnation of looting reflects the sincere and deeply held beliefs of their community. But there are other ways of understanding what is happening when local residents remove artifacts from ancient sites without recording their provenience, and there are other ways of understanding the meanings of antiquities in the modern world.

A growing body of ethnographic literature on “looting” explores the variety of social practices that are conflated by that blunt and highly prejudicial term, which is inevitably “imbued with the heritage values of archaeologists and preservationists” (Hart and Chilton 2015:319). For example, Ioanna Antoniadou has discussed unauthorized digger-collectors in northern Greece, who understand their actions as a form of defiance of the centralizing power of the state archaeological regime (Antoniadou 2016). For one recent immigrant, engagement with artifacts in the local soil is a way to “plant his own roots” in the “demographically, ethnically, and linguistically diverse land that only recently came to be construed as his homeland” (Antoniadou 2016:103). Similarly, Fiona Greenland (2021) has examined the dynamic between tombaroli (tomb robbers) and state authority in Italy. She describes how some of these unauthorized excavators, in the Italian imagination, fit into the long-admired role of “a specific type of marginalized figure, the working-class man who resists the state's absolute control of rural resources” (Greenland 2021:137). She also recounts how small collections of antiquities are often thoroughly integrated into the material cultural of village households: “Grandma's little pots” might be ancient amphorae recovered locally, passed down for generations, and used to store grains in the kitchen (Greenland 2021:147).

As students of “object biography” or “object itineraries” have long asserted, the “social lives of things,” even ancient things, do not come to an end at the moment of their deposition in the ground (Kopytoff 1986). After they are dug up, they become invested with new meanings “through the [new] social interactions they are caught up in” (Gosden and Marshall 1999:170). Many scholars have enriched our understanding of the social agency of artifacts in the modern world—their power to “assemble new networks”—by exploring their movements in and out of public and private collections (Joyce and Gillespie 2015:35). The international Follow the Pots project, for example, explores “the multiple and contested values” of Early Bronze Age ceramics as they circulate from tombs in the southern Levant to museums worldwide, passing through the hands of “archaeologists, people living in southern Ghor, looters, intermediaries, museum administrators, government officials, antiquities dealers, and collectors” (Kersel 2019). Brad Hostetler (2022) has looked closely at a relatively humble collection of ancient Mediterranean, Byzantine, Asian, and Ethiopian artifacts recently donated to Kenyon College by an alumnus, David Payne Harris. He has mapped some of the unexpected ways in which the collection shaped and was shaped by Harris's growing commitment to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. As I argue in the same volume, the trafficking that delivered the artifacts into Harris's hands harmed the historical record by erasing all information about their archaeological context. But Kenyon, by accepting and preserving the Harris collection intact, has preserved another historical artifact (Marlowe 2022). A collection is more than the sum of its parts. It is an assemblage made up of interconnected elements whose meanings have been constructed by the collector in relation to one another and to himself. Now in the context of Kenyon College, where the collection is being used to teach students about cultural property and the antiquities market, the significance of the artifacts has shifted yet again.

The stories of how and why artifacts circulate in the modern world is therefore also a valuable form of historical knowledge, parallel and equal to the knowledge archaeologists generate through analysis of archaeological context. Although they may have little reliable information about the origins of their holdings, antiquities collectors are worth collaborating with so that we can record and interpret what they have to share about the meanings of classical things in the modern world.

A WAY FORWARD

The SAA's Statement on Collaboration identifies a subset of collectors who are deemed “responsible and responsive stewards.” For reasons described above, this distinction is nearly impossible among collectors of imported antiquities. As far as responsible stewardship goes, a more pressing matter is to identify suitable public institutions that will care for these collections after their private owners are no longer able to. This will require some modification of the 2008 AAM and AAMD acquisition guidelines, which, for all their good intentions, have left hundreds of thousands of artifacts in limbo.

Some Goals

In devising the proposal that follows, I have kept the following goals in mind:

1. (1) Not to encourage the further looting of archaeological sites.

2. (2) To prevent backsliding to pre-2008 norms, when dealers, private collectors, and museum officials alike turned a blind eye to the illegal trafficking networks that supplied the market.

3. (3) To allow archaeologists and other experts to exchange information and perspectives with collectors without running the risk that their imprimatur will be used to enhance the market value of the collection if it is eventually sold.

4. (4) To educate the public about the epistemological uncertainties—including the possibility of forgery—of antiquities with unknown archaeological origins (Marlowe 2013).

5. (5) To ensure the long-term care of currently undonatable artifacts.

6. (6) To prevent private collections from being dispersed on the market. This adds fuel to the antiquities trade and further normalizes the buying and selling of poorly documented artifacts.

7. (7) To ensure that all documents associated with the objects and in the collector's possession are preserved and remain together with the objects.

8. (8) To ensure the documentation—via recorded oral history—of collectors’ recollections about the circumstances of their acquisitions, as well as their personal understandings of their collections. This might include their motives for building the collection, their understandings of the collection's constituent parts, the new social relations the collection engendered, et cetera (i.e., the “object biography” or “itinerary”).

9. (9) To ensure the smoothest possible path to restitution of the objects to their country of origin, should that prove to be warranted and desired by that country.

The Advantages of University Museums

There is no simple way to reconcile these somewhat contradictory goals, but it seems to me that university museums offer the best setting for any attempt to do so. Although their core activities—collecting, conserving, exhibiting, interpreting, educating—are largely the same as those of freestanding museums, university museums have some distinctive characteristics that make them appropriate homes for unprovenienced and poorly provenanced antiquities.

It should be noted from the outset that universities without a campus museum would not be suitable partners in this program. I acknowledge that this may strike some as exclusive or elitist. There are many worthy colleges and universities that do not have a campus museum, whose faculty members nevertheless yearn to teach with a classical collection. But the main purpose of the program proposed here is to ensure the long-term care and preservation of the collection, and that requires professionals with training in object handling, registration, curation, and conservation. These skills will be especially necessary if research on the collection's modern history determines that some or all of it should be returned to the source country. Entrusting these collections to institutions with professional museum policies concerning deaccessioning and related matters is also the strongest guarantee that they do not end up back on the market.

As for their advantages as homes for market antiquities, the first of these is their interdisciplinarity. University museums are typically expected to serve as a resource for the whole university, not just for art lovers, so exhibitions exploring wide-ranging, interdisciplinary topics such as the history of collecting, cultural property and heritage, reception history, or scientific materials analysis are likely to generate interest across campus. Universities also have on hand a wide range of experts with training in chemistry, geology, biology, classics, economics, history, religion, sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines beyond art history and archaeology who may be eager to collaborate in such research and exhibitions, and to coordinate it with their teaching (Pickering 2012).

Such coordination yields another significant difference from freestanding museums—namely, in the labor available to university museums. Freestanding museums often lament the strain on resources that unfunded provenance-research mandates such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act and the Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art place on them. Campus museums that work closely with faculty members and whose programming is aligned with the curriculum, in contrast, potentially have access to significant numbers of undergraduate and graduate researchers to carry out some of this work. When training and research are incorporated into course design, students can learn how to dig through auction catalogs, conduct oral history interviews with collectors about their acquisitions, or run lab tests on materials to determine their origins, age, and stability. Undergraduates invest deeply in their coursework when they feel empowered as producers of new knowledge. For graduate students in museum studies and related fields, this research can be carried out at a higher level and serve as an essential component of their professional training. To be sure, such labor is not cost free. Even if their initial training occurs in the context of a class, they must be closely supervised and their work checked and rechecked. Ideally, students who show passion and skill for researching a collection would be able to continue working on the project beyond the semester of their coursework, perhaps in the context of an independent study, campus museum internship, or job. Institutions that do not have the means or systems in place to foster this kind of work with their students may not be a good match for this program.

A further advantage of university museums for doing the needed work with unprovenanced collections is that they are protected structurally from some of the risks faced by their stand-alone peers. Their operating budgets are typically a portion of those of their home institutions, so they are less dependent on ticket sales to stay afloat. This gives them a certain freedom to mount exhibitions that are more specialized, challenging, or unglamorous than the crowd-pleasing blockbusters that stand-alone museums often depend on to generate revenue (Cotter 2009). Gallery labels in university museums can also be longer and more complex. The academic setting of university museums, with their doctrine of academic freedom, also gives them greater leeway to take risks and explore controversial topics (King and Marstine 2006). At the Smith College Museum of Art, an installation in 2014 considered “Questions of Authenticity.” Featuring fakes from the permanent collection, it examined the epistemological reasons why forgeries continue to escape detection, acknowledging the museum's uncertainty about some of the objects in its own collection. Brown University's Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology mounted Uncovering Ancient Egypt: Ancient Crafts, Modern Technologies, an exhibition centered on the tools scholars use to learn about “broken and unprovenienced objects” (Thum and Troche 2016). The anthropology museum at Colgate University, my home institution, recently mounted an exhibition about our museum's problematic history of collecting Native American objects, and our art museum recently explored issues such as forgeries, overcleaning, and worryingly gappy provenances in our holdings of Netherlandish painting (Picker Art Gallery 2020). All of these examples reveal an unflinching willingness to present topics that may offend audiences (including past, current, or potential donors), to acknowledge uncertainty, and to explore the institution's own contingency in the complex landscape of museum ethics and practices. These are precisely the practices needed in order for unprovenienced antiquities to become historically contextualized, teachable objects.

In this day and age, any museum that acquires unprovenanced or poorly provenanced classical antiquities should understand that their stewardship of the objects may only be temporary, and it should be prepared to restitute them should evidence emerge that that is the most appropriate course of action, whether from a legal or moral point of view. Universities and their museums may have more ways to build on the relationships that such restitutions can engender than freestanding municipal museums. Long after the objects have departed, students and faculty can continue to study the story of the restitution from a range of disciplinary perspectives—law, heritage, religion, history, ethnography, tourism, economics, et cetera. In some cases—for example, among some Native American tribes—there may be sensitivities in the community to which the objects or belongings have been returned, which may make further study inappropriate. This is less likely to be a concern with classical antiquities. (I am grateful to my colleague Becky Mendelsohn for helping me understand some of these issues.) Faculty may even be able to persuade the institution to fund travel abroad to maintain contacts with the officials and community leaders who now care for the restituted objects. To again take my own institution as an example, five Colgate University faculty members from three different departments (Geography, History, and Art History) and over a hundred students have made half a dozen trips to Perth, Australia, to foster our deepening friendships with the Aboriginal Noongar community, ever since the 2013 return of 122 drawings made by Noongar children at the Carrolup Native School and Settlement in the 1940s. These drawings had ended up in our campus museum, where they resided for 60 years unrecognized and unappreciated. As soon as they were properly identified by a visiting scholar, they were returned to the community, which placed them in the care of Curtin University in Perth (Kraly and Flowers 2016). As this story demonstrates, in the context of a university, restitution does not have to be the end of the story. It can serve as a vehicle for ongoing learning rather than as a source of shame.

Parameters

For these reasons, I propose that an exception be made to the 2008 AAM and AAMD acquisition guidelines that would allow private antiquities collectors to donate their collections to university museums. The trick will be to determine how to do so without undermining the guidelines’ strong ethical standards and messaging. One strategy would be to leave the current guidelines more or less unchanged and to create a special program that allows for exceptions under carefully controlled circumstances. The program could be overseen by an independent professional organization—perhaps the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG). Before approving any donation, this organization would take steps to ensure that it furthers the goals outlined above. Stakeholders would need to agree on some basic ground rules in advance. These might include the following:

1. (1) The exclusion of collectors who are also dealers.

2. (2) The exclusion of university museums that have not consistently adhered to the 2008 AAM/AAMD guidelines.

3. (3) Evidence that the university and university museum has the capacity and desire to teach, research, and/or display topics related to the history of collecting, object biography, cultural property, heritage management, the art market, looting, forgery, et cetera.

4. (4) Documentation of a clear deaccessioning policy that guarantees that the collection would be offered to another university museum rather than returned to the market if the institution ever decided that the collection no longer served the museum's mission.

5. (5) A commitment that the university will undertake research on the modern history of the donated collection, especially if the collector is still alive.

6. (6) A commitment to prompt and regular outreach to any securely identifiable source countries, as well as to the restitution of any pieces whose return is desired.

7. (7) A commitment to sharing the fruits of this research online, including a complete database of the artifacts and all the documents associated with them.

In addition to ensuring the preservation of the artifacts, intact collections, documents, and some of the personal histories associated with them, this program would mitigate some of the potential harms of both archaeologist–collector collaboration and any perceived weakening of the hard stance of the 2008 guidelines. For example, as long as the collaboration does not take place until after the collector has committed to the donation, there is little risk that the scholar's expertise could be used to inflate the collection's market value. Exhibitions focusing on the objects’ modern itineraries should expose, not whitewash, any messy histories of looting and trafficking. The exclusion of dealer-collectors will underscore the antithesis between the commercialization of artifacts and the educational goals of museums and universities.

A serious concern that would need to be resolved is the tax benefit that donations to charitable organizations normally entail. Donors deduct the assessed value of their donations from their taxable income. As one collector of classical antiquities has cheerfully boasted, she has been able to recoup as much as 25% of what she paid for her antiquities in this way (White 2005). Some legal scholars have argued that donors should not be able to claim tax deductions for unprovenanced antiquities (Hsieh 2018; Thompson 2010). It is beyond the scope of this project to amend federal tax codes. It is unlikely, however, that those who are concerned about the destructive effects of looting will ever feel comfortable with policies or programs that perpetuate a system in which the practice is underwritten by the US taxpayer. For the purposes of this project, it seems to me that the best solution lies in somehow appraising the value of the donated collection at $1, based, perhaps, on the argument that it is impossible to assess the fair market value of objects that could be forgeries, that could become the subject of repatriation claims, and/or simply about which so little is known for certain. Whether the responsibility for such an appraisal could rest with a certified appraiser who has been specially designated with the AAMG, or with some other body, are details that would need to be worked out.

If tax relief is off the table, why would a donor want to participate in this program? Not all will. Collectors who care less about their collection's educational potential than about recouping at least some of their financial investment (whether through sale or tax breaks); those who see collecting histories as a private matter and do not want them aired in classrooms or exhibitions; or those who are resentful that the rules of the game have changed since 2008, and who are waiting for the pendulum to swing back to dispose of their collections will see little in this program to recommend it. But those who collect out of a genuine love for and interest in the past—and who are eager to share that passion with others—may find the program worthwhile. It would offer them peace of mind knowing that their collection will be preserved, cared for, and used. It frames their activities as a collector in a historical lens, worthy of documentation and study. The fact that they built their collections during a period when the rules and attitudes around the collecting of antiquities were shifting would be part of the narrative, but the goal would be to understand, not to judge or shame. The collector could relay the stories of their acquisitions with candor. They benefit by knowing that they are contributing to knowledge of the history of collecting, of which they are themselves a part.

Many aspects of this program would still need to be worked out before it becomes viable, and before stakeholders would be satisfied that it would do more good than harm. Perhaps the most important lesson that scholars of classical antiquities can learn from our colleagues in the SAA is how to conduct these debates and how to work toward resolutions of competing goals, through an iterative process of writings, responses, open fora, surveys, task forces, shared drafts, and other forms of collaborative dialogue (Pitblado et al. 2018). I hope this article can serve as part of the conversation going forward.