Hacker News Reader

Comment by Beestie | Hacker News Reader

Unclear as to the intent of the word "Heist" in the title. Seems they are paying top dollar if not more for collections sometimes not even authenticating them.

As long as they make everything available to the public and to researchers, I don't see anything wrong with it.

Also unclear on why this is a two-part story. Is there some big shoe to drop? Trying to avoid the impression that the author is not terribly fond of the Green family.

View on HN

The "heist", which presumably gets covered in part 2, is that a lot of these items were originally looted from Iraq after the US invasion in 2003. US Customs ended up seizing a lot of them, and about 15,000 items ended up having to be returned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal

Well, visit British Museum, you will learn what is professional looting (a.k.a. robbery), not some amateurish second hand purchases done by those hobbyists.

To be honest and I am from Cyprus, the BM paid for a lot of archaeological expeditions at a time when Antiquity Laws were laxed and the expeditions could take 2/3 of the finds. The 19th century was another story, Cesnola for example (the, then American Ambassador to Cyprus) literally smuggled almost 30,000 objects, which formed the basis of the Metropolitan Museum.

The British Museum saved many artifacts which would have been destroyed by various nutty religious types ( a' la Greens ) over the centuries.

In doing so, I doubt that they broke any export regulations.

And entrance to the British Museum is free, for everyone.

Not taking any sides other than that of conservation, do you think it's possible that the Greens have already saved many artifacts from nutty religious types like ISIS, and that their efforts will continue to do so in the future?

I mean I’m not a conservator of ancient artifacts, but the pictures [0] of them dunking mummy masks in dish water to decompose them so they could check whether they were made with scrap bible papyrus… those did make my stomach turn a little. Felt a little closer to desecration that preservation.

[0] TFA links to https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/dead-men-tell-tales/148...

It makes me sick also. The Greens are nutcases. As for the mummy mask, what they did is criminal.

No they did not. They are just encouraging and creating an illegal market. The US also lacked proper laws against the importation of antiquities. For all we know it could have come into the states on a military plane and ISIS would have nothing to do with it. No museum worth its salt, with professional curators and staff would have accepted such a "loot" and as a matter of fact also reputable auctioneers. In any case it is important to study artifacts in the context where they were found, stratigraphy, nearby archaeological sites etc.

Whataboutism aside, claiming that collecting tens of thousands of artifacts for a museum operated in Washington DC, is a hobbyist endeavor, is clearly wrong.

It isn't that they weren't authenticating the items, it's that they weren't authenticating previous ownership. A lot of the items were stolen, as you can imagine there was a bit of wildness in the Middle East at the time (after the US overthrew Saddam Hussein). Which leads to the big shoe to drop. The people they were buying from and essentially funding is the group who became ISIS.

Appreciate the informative replies and citations. So, I'm a bit of a n00b in such matters so will politely ask how this situation (how to get ill-gotten artifacts of great anthropological value back into the public domain) typically gets resolved.

The idea cited in a reply that such purchases are funding ISIS (chilling to say the least) kind of implies that ISIS (or a stooge acting on their behalf) is the seller so a trace on the transaction should lead investigators to their door where the items can be confiscated and returned to the museum or public collection from which they were plundered.

I'm probably being too naive about how all this works. But I certainly understand the article much better now thanks to the informative replies.

The complexity lies in the fact that there is rarely a bill of sale like "Priceless scroll taken from tomb under ancient church before it was demolished - ISIS". There's a lot of laundering and changing of hands before they even go up for sale by these brokers whom HobbyLobby purchase from. This is completely antithetical to the ideal process for the sake of scholarship and preservation, which is meticulous and slow, documents all of the context before even touching anything, maintaining a chain of custody so that context is preserved even after removing artifacts from the site, etc.

I think it really is a problem if they're getting artifacts without clear provenance. They've had to return some manuscripts, and I thought that they'd cleaned up their acquisition process. But perhaps not?

https://www.christianitytoday.com/2020/04/bible-museum-steve...

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-museum-bible-w...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/museum-of-the-bibl...

> The speed and volume with which Carroll and the Greens collected sounded an alarm – to good and bad actors alike – of a willingness to participate in the gray market, where the legality of goods is questionable enough that accredited institutions dare not tread. Many governments prohibit the unlicensed export of culturally significant items, and UNESCO outlawed the trafficking of cultural property back in the 1970s.

Without anything concrete, this seems more like innuendo then an explicit accusation. But finding someone to pay and claiming to make artifacts 'available to researchers' doesn't necessarily make archeological trafficking legal or ethical.

They were involved in trafficking and were fined for it. They labelled antiquities "tile samples" and other things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobby_Lobby_smuggling_scandal

No innuendo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com